Paper for the Institute of Historical Review’s eighth International Conference (October 9-11, 1987), here presented in accordance with the French version first published in Les Annales d’histoire révisionniste, n° 8, printemps 1990, p. 15-82

 

What is commonly called the “Faurisson affair” began on November 16, 1978 with the publication of an article about me in the newspaper Le Matin de Paris. For several years I’d known that, the day the press disclosed my revisionist opinions, I would face a storm. By its very nature revisionism can only disturb the public order; where tranquil certainties reign, the spirit of free inquiry is an intruder and it causes scandal. The first task of the courts is not so much to defend justice as to preserve public order. The truth, in the sense in which I understand the word (i.e., that which is verifiable), only interests judges if it doesn’t provoke a deep disturbance of public order. I harboured no illusions: I would be hauled into court and would lose the case, and this in addition to physical assaults, press campaigns and upheaval of my personal, family and professional life.

My previous IHR conference paper dates from September 1983; its title was Historical revisionism before the French courts / Part one 1979-1983. The present paper is the continuation of that earlier one. I’ve entitled it “My Life as a Revisionist (September 1983 to September 1987)”. The period between 1979 and 1983 was marked in France by the legal activity carried out against revisionism. The period since then has been characterised by an easing of that activity which, I’m afraid, is going to resume in 1987-1988. In France, the Jewish organisations that had initiated the legal actions were strongly disappointed and even disconcerted by the relative lightness of the decision against me in April 1983. They expected better from the French justice system. They wanted my “hide” and they got only a pound of my flesh. They were hoping the judges would declare: “Faurisson is a falsifier of history; his work on the gas chambers is full of nonchalance, negligence, wilful ignorance and lies; Faurisson is malevolent and dangerous.” However, on April 26, 1983 the judges of the first chamber of the Paris court of appeal concluded, in a sense: “Faurisson is a serious researcher; we find in his work on the gas chambers neither nonchalance, negligence, wilful ignorance nor lies; but Faurisson is perhaps malevolent and he is certainly dangerous; we find against him for that probable malevolence and for that danger, but we do not condemn his work on the gas chambers, which is serious. On the contrary, given the seriousness of this work, we guarantee all Frenchman the right to say, if such is their opinion, that the gas chambers did not exist”.

What the Jewish organisations couldn’t achieve in France from 1979 to 1983 they then attempted in other countries and, notably, with the enormous trial to which they took Ernst Zündel in Canada. In 1984 and 1985 I actively participated in Zündel’s defence and, in the first part of my exposé, I shall deal with that trial which, despite all, was advantageous in that it made historical research leap forward. The second part will be about the many “affairs”, as they’re called, which, mainly in France, have marked both the failure of those who want to block historical research (the exterminationists) and the success of those who advocate such research (the revisionists). In a third part I shall attempt a review of historical revisionism’s gains as of today and then tell you what, in my view, our future prospects are.

My general impression is as follows: I am optimistic about the future of revisionism but pessimistic about the future of the revisionists. Revisionism today is so vigorous that from now on there will be no stopping it; we need no longer fear the silence imposed on us. But revisionist researchers are going to pay dearly for this development of their ideas and it cannot be ruled out that, in some countries, we’ll be reduced to a samizdat activity because of increased danger and growing poverty (due particularly to legal expenses and fines).

 

I. – The Zündel trial (1985) or “the trial of the Nuremberg trial”

 

The year 1985 will mark a great date in the history of revisionism. It will remain the year of the Zündel trial or, to be more precise, of the first Zündel trial, since a second is currently being prepared.

I believe I know Ernst Zündel rather well. I made his acquaintance in Los Angeles in 1979 at our Institute for Historical Review’s first conference and we’ve remained on good terms since then. In June 1984 I went to Toronto, where he lives, to assist him in his “pre-trial” (the court proceedings in which a Canadian judge decides whether a case should go to actual trial before a judge and jury). I returned in January 1985 to Toronto where, for almost the entire seven weeks of his trial, I again assisted Zündel. In the future I’ll continue to help him to the extent of my abilities. The man is exceptional.

Until that period he worked as a graphic artist and publicist. He is 49 years of age. Born in Germany in 1938, he has kept his German citizenship. His life has seen great upheavals since the day when, in the early 1980s, he began to distribute Richard Harwood’s revisionist brochure Did Six Million Really Die? This brochure had first been published in Britain in 1974 sparking, the following year, a lengthy controversy in the columns of Books and Bookmen. After an intervention of the South African Jewish community, it was banned in South Africa.

In 1984, in Canada, Sabina Citron, head of the Holocaust Remembrance Association, induced violent demonstrations against Zündel. There was a bomb attack at his house. The Canadian post office, likening revisionist literature to pornographic literature, denied him the ability to send or receive mail and he was to recover his postal rights only after a year of legal procedures. In the meantime, despite the excellent reputation he enjoyed in professional circles, his business had collapsed. At the instigation of Sabrina Citron, the attorney general of Ontario charged Zündel with having published a false statement, tale or news liable to disturb a public interest. Section 177 [now – in 2011 – section 181] of the Canadian criminal code states:

Every one who wilfully publishes a statement, tale or news that he knows is false and that causes or is likely to cause injury or mischief to a public interest is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years.

The prosecution’s reasoning was as follows: the defendant had abused his right to freedom of expression; in distributing Harwood’s brochure, he was spreading information that he knew to be false; in effect, he could not be unaware that the “genocide of the Jews” and the “gas chambers” were an established fact. That distribution affected or was “likely to affect social and racial tolerance in the Canadian community” (trial transcripts, p. 1682).

Zündel was also prosecuted for having personally written and distributed a letter of the same inspiration as the brochure, entitled The West, the War and Islam.

The costs of the proceedings were borne by the Canadian taxpayer and not by Sabina Citron’s association.

The judge’s name was Hugh Locke and the prosecutor was Peter Griffiths. Zündel was defended by British Columbia barrister Douglas Christie, assisted by Mrs Keltie Zubko. There was a jury of twelve. The English-language media gave the trial extensive coverage.

The jury found Zündel not guilty for his own letter but guilty for distributing the brochure. He was sentenced by Mr Locke to fifteen months’ imprisonment and forbidden to talk or write about the Holocaust. The German consulate in Toronto took away his passport. Canada initiated deportation proceedings against him. Previously, the West German authorities had launched throughout Germany a huge one-day operation of police raids at the houses of all his correspondents.

But Zündel had won a media victory. In spite of their declared hostility the Canadian media and, in particular, television had revealed to the English-speaking public that the revisionists possessed documentation and a line of argument of considerable strength, whereas the exterminationists were in dire straits.

In the forty years that have passed since the end of the Second World War, a new religion has developed: the religion of the Holocaust. It took shape at the Nuremberg trial (1945-1946), which was followed by many other trials; moreover, trials still continue to be held. Numerous historians have become advocates of this religion: the first among these is indisputably Raul Hilberg. A mob of witnesses or alleged such have taken the stand in court to give evidence for the reality of a genocide of the Jews and for the Germans’ use of homicidal gas chambers: one of the most important of these will have been Rudolf Vrba.

However, it so happens that in 1985, at the Zündel trial, the prosecution mainly invoked the Nuremberg trial, and secured the appearance of both Hilberg and Vrba. Zündel had predicted that his trial would be “the trial of the Nuremberg triall” and “the exterminationists’ Stalingrad”. Events proved him right. The Nuremberg trial emerged in its injustice, Hilberg in his incompetence as a historian and Vrba in his imposture. I shall not speak of the other witnesses called by prosecutor Griffiths, particularly not of Arnold Friedman, presented as a witness to the gassings at Auschwitz. Driven into a corner by barrister Christie’s questions, Friedman ended up confessing that he had indeed been at Auschwitz-Birkenau (where, besides, he’d never had to work except once, unloading potatoes) but that, as far as gassings were concerned, he’d relied on hearsay.

 

Injustice of the Nuremberg trial

 

“International Military Tribunal”: these three words, as has been pointed out, are three lies. That “tribunal” was not a jurisdiction in the normal sense of the word but resembled an association of victors intent on settling the vanquished’s account in line with the principle that might makes right. It was not “military” since, of the eight men who sat on it (two Americans, two Britons, two Frenchmen and two Soviets), only the two Soviets were military judges, the more important of them being a notorious Stalinist,  I. T. Nikitchenko, who had presided over the famous Moscow trials (1936-1937). That “tribunal” was not “international” but inter-allied. Its existence was based on the London Agreement, which had defined war crimes, crimes against peace (preparing and initiating a war of aggression) and crimes against humanity. The London Agreement was dated August 8, 1945; in other words it came two days after the Allies’ atomisation of Hiroshima and preceded by 24 hours their atomisation of Nagasaki, whilst on that very day of August 8 the Soviet Union was attacking Japan. The atomic bomb had been prepared essentially with a view to its use against German cities and one wonders, that being the case, what moral lesson the Allies could claim to impose on the Germans and by what right another “International Military Tribunal” tried, in Tokyo, the Japanese.

This “tribunal” resorted to the retroactivity of laws and to collective guilt. It tried without the possibility of appeal, which means that it could take the liberty of acting arbitrarily with no fear of disavowal. The case was a criminal one but there was no jury. The prosecution had formidable resources at its disposal and, notably, control of the war records taken from the enemy. The defence had derisory resources; it was under constraint and under close surveillance. For example, the barristers were not allowed to talk about the Treaty of Versailles or to show that National Socialism had developed in part as a reaction to the effects of that treaty. Articles 19 and 21 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal pronounced:

The Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence… [and] shall not require proof of facts of common knowledge, but shall take judicial notice thereof.

Perhaps worst of all, the same Article 21 accorded, as it were, force of law to the reports of the Allies’ own war crimes commissions.

For my part, the Nuremberg trial suggests the following comparison: after a boxing match turned to slaughter, there remain in the ring a colossus standing on his legs – it’s the winner – and, on the canvas, his bloodied victim: the loser. The colossus pulls the victim to his feet and gives him the following talk: “Don’t go thinking it’s all over, you! Give me time to go to the dressing room! I’ll be back in a judge’s robe and I’ll be trying you under my law. You’ll have to account for all the punches you landed on me while, except for anything I may tolerate at my discretion, you’ll have no right to talk about the punches I dealt you.”

By acting that way, the Allies set off in 1945 on the wrong foot. They acted towards the defeated with arrogance and cynicism. They gave themselves complete freedom to make things up and to lie. They were rash. They should have sought, in accordance with the methods of sound justice, to verify their accusations. There are proven means for doing this. Let’s take some examples. If the Germans had in fact ordered and planned the murder of all the Jews, it was appropriate to establish the existence of an order and a plan; to put it another way, criminal intent had to be proved. If they had indeed perfected formidable death-works called gas chambers, it was appropriate to establish the existence of those gas slaughterhouses; in other words, the reality of the crime weapon had to be proved: forensic examinations were needed. If the Germans had actually used that weapon, the proper thing to do was to prove that detainees had been killed by poison gas: therefore post-mortems were needed.

However, neither during the Nuremberg trial nor during the numerous other trials of the same kind did the victors produce either any proof of criminal intent, any forensic report on the crime weapon or any post-mortem of a victim of that crime. Here we have before us, then, an alleged crime of gigantic proportions but regarding which neither criminal intent, nor any weapon, nor any corpse seems to have been found. Those in charge have been content with unverified confessions and with testimonies without cross-examination on the very materiality of the purported facts.

 

Return to the methods of sound justice

 

Ernst Zündel’s merit lies in his understanding that the revisionists are right when they proclaim that, in order to discover the truth about the point of history in question, it suffices to return to the traditional methods of both jurists and historians.

Zündel’s boldness lies in his putting such obvious things into practice.

Zündel’s genius lies in his being plain and direct where, for forty years, all the counsel or defenders of alleged “criminals against humanity” had shilly-shallied. In effect, from 1945 until 1987 and the Klaus Barbie trial, I note that not a single lawyer dared to take the bull by the horns. Not one demanded that the prosecution prove the reality of the genocide and the gas chambers. All the defence lawyers adopted dilatory methods. Generally, they argued that their client hadn’t been personally involved in such a crime; their client, they said, had not been at the site of the crime, or else he’d been too far away to be clearly conscious of it, or had been totally unaware of it. Even Jacques Vergès, Barbie’s lawyer, argued that his client, according to the accepted formula, “could not know”. This convoluted formula means that, for Vergès, the extermination of the Jews did take place at Auschwitz or elsewhere in Poland but that lieutenant Barbie, living in Lyon, could not know about it.

Wilhelm Stäglich, in his book The Auschwitz Myth, has convincingly described how, at the Frankfurt trial (1963-1965), the defence lawyers had, in that way, strengthened the prosecution; they endorsed the extermination myth. The motives for such behaviour may be either the deep conviction among the lawyers, as among certain of the accused, that that abominable crime had really taken place, or the fear of arousing a scandal by merely seeking clarification on the reality of the crime. For nearly all people it would be blasphemous, in the trial of a “Nazi”, to demand observance of the traditional rules; it must be understood that a “Nazi” is not a man “like another” and that, in consequence, there is no reason to try him “like another”. My personal experience with lawyers in trials of this kind leads me to think that many of them are also fearful due to heir own incompetence in the historical or scientific domain. They have the impression that it must be impossible to answer the arguments of the exterminationists, and have barely even heard about the revisionists’ arguments to the contrary.

In Douglas Christie, Zündel was able to find a lawyer who, more than courageous, is heroic. It’s for this reason that I agreed to assist Doug Christie, day after day, in the preparations for and execution of his task. I hasted to add that without the help of his friend Keltie Zubko we wouldn’t have been able to carry out that exhausting enterprise, which has left me nightmarish memories. The atmosphere prevailing in the courtroom was oppressive, particularly because of the attitude of the judge, Hugh Locke. I’ve attended many trials in my life, including some in France during the time of the Épuration, i.e. the post-war purge of “collaborators”. Never have I encountered a judge so partial, autocratic and violent as judge Locke. English justice systems provide many more guarantees than the French but it takes only one man to pervert the best of systems: Hugh Locke was that man. I remember Locke shouting at me “Shut up!” because, from a distance, without saying a word, I was waving a document in the direction of Doug Christie (that exclamation and a few others of the same ilk were not noted by the court-reporter, although it was her job to transcribe everything in shorthand). Among the judge’s countless tantrums I recall also the one caused by… a square metre. In order to have the judge understand the impossibility of placing 28 to 32 persons in the space of a square metre (which is what Kurt Gerstein said he’d seen), we’d prepared four sticks, each a metre in length, and were about to call forth 28 to 32 people. The judge sprang up and shouted; our procedure seemed to him unworthy, and he forbade us to use it, adding, for good measure, a remark that deserves to go down in history:

Before I could allow the jury to accept one square metre, I would have to hear [in the jury’s absence] a lot of witnesses who measured it (transcripts, p. 912).

Our method disconcerted the adversary as well as the judge; it was resolutely material or materialist. We had an abundance of maps and ground plans of concentration camps, including aerial photographs taken during the war by the Allies. We had at our disposal a mass of photographs, thanks especially to the Swedish researcher Ditlieb Felderer, who knows every nook and cranny of the Auschwitz and Majdanek camps. There was no lack of technical documents on cremations in the open air or in crematoria, on Zyklon B, on disinfestation gas chambers. I myself had brought five valises of books and documents to Toronto, but was just one researcher among others whom Zündel had gathered together from different parts of the world.

Locke set about trying to thwart our efforts. Thus it was that he denied me the right to talk about Zyklon, aerial photos, crematorium buildings located at Auschwitz and supposed to contain homicidal gas chambers, although it was I who’d been the first in the world to publish the plans of those buildings and to prove, at the same time, that those alleged gas chambers had in reality been only cold rooms for bodies (Leichenhalle or Leichenkeller). Thanks to those plans, Zündel had had large scale models made to show to the jury but, here again, the judge intervened and forbade us to display the professionally made models. On top of it all, Locke forbade me to talk about the gas chambers used for executions in the United States; he said he didn’t see the connection. In fact, the connection was as follows: the Americans used hydrogen cyanide gas for their executions; but Zyklon B, which the Germans had supposedly used to kill millions of detainees, was also essentially hydrogen cyanide gas. Anyone wanting to study the crime weapon par excellence purportedly used by the Germans ought, in my opinion, to examine the American gas chambers. That’s what I had done, for my part, and I’d deduced that the homicidal gassings ascribed to the Germans constituted, in physical and chemical terms, an utter impossibility.

Nevertheless, despite Locke and his decrees, we (Doug Christie and myself) were going to reduce to naught the expertise of Raul Hilberg and the testimony of Rudolf Vrba.

Incompetence of their number one expert: Raul Hilberg^[1]

Raul Hilberg was born in Vienna in 1926. He is of Jewish origin. He obtained a doctorate “in public law and government” in 1955. Like the great majority of authors, both exterminationist and revisionist, who’ve written on the Holocaust, he did not train as a historian. He belongs to the Holocaust Memorial Council “by appointment of President Carter”. He is a member of “the Jewish Studies Association”. He is the author of a work of reference: The Destruction of the European Jews, published in 1961. A second “revised and definitive” edition of that book was to appear in 1985, only a few months after its author’s testimony at the Zündel trial. This point has its importance and I shall return to it later.

Raul Hilberg testified in the capacity of expert. He arrived in Toronto clad in his prestige, without books, without notes, without documents, apparently sure of his case, as a man used to giving depositions at numerous trials of “war criminals”. He testified for several days at the rate, probably, of $150 per hour. Questioned by prosecutor Griffiths, Hilberg developed his thesis about the extermination of the Jews: according to him, Hitler had given orders to exterminate the Jews; the Germans had followed a plan; they’d used gas chambers; overall Jewish losses amounted to 5,100,000. Hilberg did not shrink from describing himself in these terms:

I would describe myself as an empiricist, looking at the materials… (transcripts, p. 687).

As soon as the cross-examination began Hilberg found himself out of his depth. For the first time in his life he was dealing with an accused who was determined to defend himself and able to defend himself. Doug Christie, whom I sat beside, cross-examined Hilberg unwaveringly, unremittingly, for several days. His questions were pointed, precise, ruthless. Until then I had a certain esteem for Hilberg because of the quantity, but not the quality, of his work; in any event he stood head and shoulders above the Poliakovs and the other Wellers or Klarsfelds. Over the days in court this relative esteem was replaced by a feeling of irritation and pity: irritation because Hilberg was constantly dodging, and pity because, nearly every time, Christie ended up flooring him.

In any case, if one result was clear, it was that Hilberg was in no sense an “empiricist, an analyst of documents”; he was exactly the opposite; he was a man lost in the fumes of his ideas, a sort of theologian who’d built himself a mental universe where the materiality of the facts had no place; he was just a much too pompous professor, a “paper historian” à la Pierre Vidal-Naquet. He stumbled already at the first question. Doug Christie announced that he was going to read him a list of wartime camps and then ask which ones he’d examined and how many times. It turned out he hadn’t examined any, either before publishing the first edition of his major work in 1961 or after that date, and not even for the “definitive” edition of 1985. Given that he’d begun working on the question of the Holocaust in 1948, we were thus in the presence of a man who’d acquired a reputation as the world’s foremost historian in his field of research without having once, in 37 years, examined a single concentration camp. He’d visited but two camps, Auschwitz and Treblinka, in 1979: “One day in Treblinka, and perhaps a half a day in Auschwitz, half a day in Birkenau” [transcripts, p. 774] – and even then it was merely to attend ceremonies. He hadn’t had the curiosity to inspect either the premises or, on site, the Auschwitz archives. He had never visited the places called “gas chambers” (transcripts, p. 771-773 and 822-823). Requested to provide some explanations on the crematoria building plans and on photographs and graphics, Hilberg refused, stating:

If you are going to show me building plans, photographs, diagrams, I do not have the same competence as I would with documents expressed in words (transcripts, p. 778).

He estimated the number of Jews having died at Auschwitz at more than one million and the non-Jewish dead at “perhaps 300,000” (transcripts, p. 826), but did not explain how he’d arrived at those estimates, nor why the Poles and the Soviets had arrived at a total of four million, the figure inscribed on the Birkenau monument (transcripts, p. 896).

Christie then questioned him about the camps supposed to have had homicidal gas chambers. Christie went through their names, asking Hilberg each time whether or not the camp in question had possessed one or more of those gas chambers. The answer should have been simple for this eminent specialist but, here again, Hilberg was out of his depth. Alongside the camps “with” and the camps “without” gas chambers, he created, in the debacle of his improvisations, two other categories of camp: those that had “perhaps” had a gas chamber (Dachau, Flossenburg, Neuengamme, Sachsenhausen) and those that had had a “very small gas chamber” (for example, Struthof-Natzweiler in Alsace), so small that one wondered whether it was worth talking about (transcripts, p. 896); he didn’t disclose his criteria for distinguishing among those four categories of camp. Asked whether he knew of any expert report establishing that such or such room had actually been a homicidal gas chamber, he first turned a deaf ear, then sidestepped and repeatedly gave the most inappropriate answers. His delaying tactics became so patent that judge Locke, generally so quick to come to the aid of the prosecution, felt obliged to intervene and request an answer. Only then did Hilberg, no longer trying to evade the issue, reply that he knew of no such report. There are 14 pages of transcript (p. 968-981) from the moment that embarrassing question was put till the moment when it was finally answered.

Did Hilberg know of a post-mortem establishing that such or such detainee’s body was that of a person killed by poison gas? The answer, here again, was “No” (transcripts, p. 983-984).

Since Hilberg, on the other hand, made so much of testimonies, he was questioned on that of Kurt Gerstein. He attempted to say that, in his book, he hardly used that SS officer’s confessions at all. To which Christie retorted that, in The Destruction of the European Jews, the name of Gerstein appeared 23 times and that document PS-1553 of the same Gerstein was cited 10 times. Then a few fragments of those confessions, in their different forms, were read before the jury. Hilberg ended up concurring that certain parts of those confessions of Gerstein were “pure nonsense” (transcripts, p. 904).^[2]  

It was the same scenario with the confessions of Rudolf Höss. Hilberg, caving in, at a certain point had to admit: “It’s terrible” (transcripts, p. 1076), which, in the context, meant “It’s indefensible”. Regarding the most important of the “confessions” signed by Höss (PS-3868), he acknowledged that here we had a man making a deposition in a language (English) other than his own (German), a deposition whose content was wholly unacceptable; it “seems to have been a summary of things he said or may have said or may have thought he said by someone who shoved a summary in front of him and he signed, which is unfortunate” (transcripts, p. 1230 [my emphasis]). With regard to the fact that, according to that “confession”, 2,500,000 persons had been gassed at Auschwitz, Hilberg went so far as to say that it was

an obviously unverified, totally exaggerated number, one which may well have been known or circulated as a result of some faulty initial findings by a Soviet-Polish investigation commission in Auschwitz. [transcripts, p. 1087]

Sensing that he must throw off some ballast, Hilberg had no trouble agreeing with Christie that some “historians”, like William Shirer, were, so to speak, worthless (transcripts, p. 1202). He was asked his opinion on the testimony of Filip Müller, author of Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers. Passages imbued with the purest sex-shop anti-Nazism were read to him, and Christie demonstrated before the jury, thanks to an analysis by the revisionist Carlo Mattogno, that Filip Müller, or his ghost-writer, Helmut Freitag, had quite simply plagiarised in taking a whole episode, practically word for word, from Doctor at Auschwitz, the notorious fake signed by Miklos Nyiszli. Here, Hilberg suddenly changed tactic: he feigned emotion and, in a pathetic tone, declared that Müller’s testimony was far too moving for anyone to cast suspicion on its sincerity (transcripts, p. 1151-1152). But everything rang false in this new Hilberg who, until then, had expressed himself in a monotonous voice and with the guardedness of a cat wary of embers in the fireplace. Christie did not deem it useful to insist.

In two instances Hilberg went through torture: first, regarding Hitler’s alleged orders to exterminate the Jews, then, regarding what I personally call “the cornerstone of Hilberg’s thesis”. On page 177 of his book (1961 edition), Hilberg finally addresses the heart of his subject: the policy of extermination of the Jews. In a page that stands as a general introduction, he lays the bases of his demonstration. For him, it all began with two successive orders from Adolf Hitler. The first order was to go and kill the Jews on the spot, particularly in Russia (the Einsatzgruppen were supposedly charged with that mission); the second order was to round up the Jews and take them to extermination camps (this was purportedly the role of Adolf Eichmann and his men). Hilberg gave neither a precise date nor any reference for these two orders; conversely, he did give a precise date (November 25, 1944) and a reference (doc. PS-3762) for an order that, according to him, Heinrich Himmler, sensing the coming defeat, had given to halt the extermination of the Jews (The Destruction of the European Jews, p. 631).

Nothing was missing for this thesis – except the truth of those orders’ existence.

However, none of those three orders – the two from Hitler and the one from Himmler – had had any existence and it was all just a mental construct. But Christie had to wage veritable siege warfare to get Hilberg finally to surrender and admit that he couldn’t show those orders. Thirty-one pages of transcript (828-858) are taken up from the point where Hilberg is asked where those two orders from Hitler are until the point where, war-weary, he admits that there is “no trace” of them. Meanwhile Christie had also reminded him of the words he’d uttered in February 1983 at a gathering in the Avery Fisher concert hall in New York, where Hilberg himself developed a thesis that sat rather badly with the existence of any extermination order. He had stated:

But what began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organised centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures. They were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus there came about not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus-mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy. (Newsday [Long Island, New York], February 23, 1983. Section II, p. 3)

This quintessentialised explanation plunges us into the thick of theology and parapsychology. The extermination of the Jews – a gigantic enterprise – was supposedly done without any plan, without the least centralising body, without a project, without a budget, but by telepathic divination within a certain apparatus: the bureaucracy, from which, in my opinion, one may expect anything but, precisely, divination and telepathy.

As concerned the order from Himmler, Hilberg also admitted that there remained “no trace” of it (transcripts, p. 860); the “reference” and the precise date he’d given were thus shown to be a mere attempt to intimidate the reader.

But what is there to say about “the cornerstone of his thesis”? In his Hoax of the Twentieth Century, Arthur R. Butz writes:

Hilberg’s book did what the opposition literature [revisionist literature] could never have done. I not only became convinced that the legend of several million gassed Jews must be a hoax, but I derived what turned out to be a fairly reliable “feel” for the remarkable cabalistic mentality that had given the lie its specific form (those who want to experience the “rude awakening” somewhat as I did may stop here and consult p. 567-571 of Hilberg). (Hoax…, p. 7)

Thus does Prof. Butz designate what constitutes, with those pages 567-571,  the centre of Hilberg’s thesis. As for me, I’ve wanted to seek “the centre of the centre”, the “cornerstone”, so to speak, of that construct of a cabalistic mind and I think I’ve found it at the top of page 570, where one reads:

The amounts of [Zyklon] required by Auschwitz were not large, but they were noticeable. Almost the whole Auschwitz supply was needed for the gassing of people; very little was used for fumigation. The camp administration itself did not buy the gas. The purchaser was Obersturmführer Gerstein, Chief Disinfection Officer in the Office of the Hygienic Chief of the Waffen-SS (Mrugowski). As a rule, all orders passed through the hands of TESTA, DEGESCH, and Dessau. From the Dessau Works, which produced the gas, shipments were sent directly to Auschwitz Extermination and Fumigation Division (Abteilung Entwesung und Entseuchung).

In this passage Hilberg clearly says that at Auschwitz there were two types of use of Zyklon: for the gassing of persons and for the fumigation of things. A single office or “division” directed these two activities: one criminal and the other for the protection of health. That division even had one name: Abteilung Entwesung und Entseuchung, which Hilberg translates by “Extermination and Fumigation Division”. In other words, the Germans made no secret of the extermination of people by gas at Auschwitz since, in that camp, there was a “division” duly and clearly charged with that criminal function. There was but one misfortune for Hilberg: Entwesung means “disinfestation” and not “extermination” of human beings (whereas Entseuchung means “decontamination”). Confronted with this obvious fact, which we established with the aid of dictionaries, Hilberg made the error of trying to maintain his own translation and, during his re-examination by prosecutor Griffiths, he took out a German dictionary to prove that Entwesung was composed of Ent-, marking separation, and of Wesen, which denotes any “animated being” (transcripts, p. 1237). This was to confuse – or, rather, to affect to confuse for the needs of the case – etymology and meaning. Even prosecutor Griffiths appeared dismayed at the laborious subterfuge of his expert, who had gone and chosen a German dictionary that didn’t include the word Entwesung but only the word Wesen!

Shortly after the trial I discovered that Hilberg had committed perjury. In January 1985, under oath, he’d dared to state before judge and jury that, in the new edition of his book, then at press, he maintained the existence of those orders from Hitler, of which he had just acknowledged there remained “no trace” (transcripts, p. 852). However, he was lying. In this new edition, with a preface dated September 1984 (Hilberg gave his evidence under oath in January 1985), all mention of an order from Hitler was systematically eliminated; his colleague and friend Christopher Browning pointed this out himself in a review of the book entitled The Revised Hilberg (Simon Wiesenthal Centre Annual 3, 1986, p. 294):

In the new edition, all references in the text to a Hitler decision or Hitler order for the “Final Solution” have been systematically excised. Buried at the bottom of a single footnote stands the solitary reference: “Chronology and circumstances point to a Hitler decision before the summer [of 1941] ended.” In the new edition, decisions were not made and orders were not given.

This fact is grave. It proves that, in order to be surer of obtaining the conviction of Ernst Zündel (whose thesis is, in particular, that there was never an order from Hitler or anyone else to exterminate the Jews), a university professor had not shrunk from resorting to lies and perjury.

Such is Raul Hilberg, a professor and researcher for whom, in the coming years, it will only remain to take stock of “the failure of a lifetime” (transcripts, p. 948).^[3]  

Imposture of their number one witness: Rudolf Vrba

 

Witness Rudolf Vrba was internationally known. A Slovakian Jew, interned at Auschwitz and Birkenau, he’d escaped, he said, from the Birkenau camp in April of 1944 together with his friend Alfred Wetzler. Once back in Slovakia he had, he also said, dictated a report on Auschwitz, on Birkenau, on their crematoria and their “gas chambers”.

By the intermediary of Jewish groups in Slovakia, Hungary and Switzerland, this report arrived in Washington where it served as the basis for the famous “War Refugee Board Report” published in November 1944. Thus every Allied body in charge of prosecuting “war criminals” and every Allied prosecutor responsible for the “war criminals’” trials were to have at their disposal the official – and lie-ridden – version of the history of those camps. Rudolf Vrba and his companion Alfred Wetzler are behind the officialisation of the Auschwitz myth; A. R. Butz demonstrates this admirably (see, in The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, the references to “Vrba” and the “WRB Report”).

After the war, Vrba became a British citizen and he published his life story under the title I Cannot Forgive; actually this book, released in 1964, had been penned by a ghost-writer, Alan Bestic, who, in his preface (p. 2), ventured to pay tribute to Vrba “for the immense trouble he took over every detail; for the meticulous, almost fanatical respect he revealed for accuracy…”.

On November 30, 1964 Vrba testified at the “Frankfurt trial”. Afterwards he settled in Canada and took out Canadian citizenship. He appeared in various filmed reports on Auschwitz and, in particular, in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. Today he lives in Vancouver, where he is associate professor in pharmacology at the University of British Columbia.

Everything smiled on this witness until the day he faced Doug Christie.

Arthur Butz’s book supplied us with excellent basic components for Vrba’s cross-examination and my documents (especially the “Calendar of events in the Auschwitz camp”, the studies gathered together in the different volumes of the blue Auschwitz Anthology, Serge Klarsfeld’s Mémorial de la déportation des Juifs de France [1978] and various documents from the Auschwitz Museum archives) made it possible to ask Vrba some embarrassing questions. The impostor was unmasked, in particular, on three points: his alleged knowledge of the Birkenau gas chambers and crematoria; Himmler’s alleged visit to Birkenau in January 1943 for the inauguration of a new crematorium with, as highlight of the event, the gassing of 3,000 persons; the alleged total of 1,750,000 Jews gassed at Birkenau from April 1942 to April 1944.

On the first point, it became clear that the witness had never set foot in those crematoria and “gas chambers”, for which he had gone so far as to provide the ground plan – totally false – in his report to the War Refugee Board (November 1944), a plan that in 1985 he boldly persisted in guaranteeing as true. Nothing corresponded to the truth: neither the layout of the rooms, nor their dimensions, nor the number of ovens, nor the number of oven mouths; for example, the witness placed the “gas chamber” and the oven room on the same level, drawing rails along which “flat trucks” were allegedly pushed between the two. In reality the oven room was at ground level and the “gas chamber” (in fact, a cold room) was situated below ground: obviously no rails could have linked an underground space to a space at ground level.

On the second point, Vrba had likewise made everything up. Himmler’s last visit to Birkenau had taken place in July 1942 and, in January 1943, the first of the new crematoria there was far from finished (we even possess documents from the construction service mentioning the difficulties in building due to the winter cold). Vrba’s book opens, not without ostentation, on that visit, described with a wealth of detail; even the reflections and conversations of Himmler and his entourage are reported. However, all of that had emerged from Vrba’s imagination, too.

The witness had an exceptional self-assurance. He claimed to have been everywhere at once, day and night, in the vast Birkenau camp. He had registered and retained everything thanks, he said, to “special mnemonic principles” (transcripts, p. 1563). According to him, the Germans had “gassed”, in Birkenau alone and in the span of only 25 months (from April 1942 to April 1944), about 1,750,000 Jews, of whom 150,000 from France. However, Serge Klarsfeld, in his 1978 Mémorial, had had to conclude that, throughout the entire war, the Germans had deported to all their concentration camps a total of 75,721 Jews (French, foreign or stateless) from France. Vrba was asked to explain himself regarding his specific estimate of 150,000 and his general estimate of 1,750,000. He began by calling the figure of 75,721 false. “From where do you have the figure? From the Nazi newspapers?” he asked (transcripts, p. 1579); however, that figure came from Serge Klarsfeld, the “Nazi-hunter”. Then he attempted to improvise a justification of his own figures, but in vain, as will be seen further on.

Despite his aplomb, he had to beat a retreat from start to finish as concerned his book. Instead of maintaining that in it he had shown the greatest care for truth and accuracy, he stated that the book was but a literary attempt in which he had resorted to poetic licence. He used the following expressions:

an artistic picture… an attempt for an artistic depiction… a literary essay… an artistic attempt… art piece in literature… literature… artist… licence of a poet… licentia poetarum. (transcripts, p. 1390, 1391, 1392, 1446-1448)

In short, for the number one witness for the prosecution, represented by Mr Griffiths, this cross-examination was a disaster. We waited with curiosity to see how Griffiths would try, during the re-examination, to restore some lustre to his witness. To the general surprise Griffiths, probably exhausted by the trial and exasperated by the lies of the witness on whom he had counted so much, executed Vrba with two questions that were like two rifle shots. His first question – listened to by a hushed courtroom – was:

You told Mr Christie several times in discussing your book I Cannot Forgive that you used poetic licence in writing that book. Have you used poetic licence in your testimony? (transcripts, p. 1636)

Vrba, disconcerted, mumbled an answer, after which Griffiths, without pausing, put his second question:

Could you tell us, Doctor, briefly, how you arrived at the number of 1,765,000? (transcripts, p. 1637)

To appreciate properly both the question as a whole and the use of the word “briefly”, one must bear in mind that Vrba had been asked that question by several times by Doug Christie and that his attempts at reply had all been interminable, confused, absurd and, sometimes, even unintentionally comical. Vrba was scarcely able to answer Griffith’s question except with his refrain:

I developed a special mnemonical method for remembering each transport. (transcripts, p. 1639)

Griffiths, getting a bit lost in his documentation, announced he would be putting one last question on Himmler’s visit. He requested a recess. When the hearing resumed Vrba took his place at the bar or, more exactly, in the witness box, situated at a certain height, between the judge and the jury. He awaited the return of the jury and the question on Himmler’s visit. It was then that Griffiths, addressing the judge, declared:

Just before the jury is brought in, Your Honour, I will have no questions of Dr Vrba. (transcripts, p. 1641)

Everyone was stunned. Vrba, I can attest, went pallid. He descended from the box. He staggered. He left the room. Whereas on the first day he’d seen the journalists and cameras crowding around him as around the witness who was going to shut the revisionists up, on this last day he left the courthouse in the most dreadful solitude. I do not pity Vrba; he has the arrogance of an impostor by trade; he’ll raise his head again; he’ll resume his lies, I’m convinced of it.^[4]  

 

Defeat and victory of Ernst Zündel

 

The trial took a turn in our favour. I don’t mean that at that moment the jury would have acquitted Zündel, for such a decision would have demanded of them, before the judge, the journalists and public opinion, a show of courage that is difficult, not to say impossible, to find in twelve persons picked at random in a society that, for forty years, had been subjected to the propaganda we all know about the “Nazi crimes”. But prosecutor Griffiths was obviously shattered. Then came the defence’s witnesses and experts. Griffiths became still more distraught. He wasn’t expecting such a wealth of information on the part of the revisionists. Judge Locke remained in an angry mood. He threatened to charge Doug Christie with contempt of court at the end of the trial, and this sword of Damocles stayed, until the final day, hanging over our barrister’s head. It was then that there came a reversal of the situation in the prosecution’s favour. Doug Christie decided to summon the testimony of Zündel himself. This was perhaps an error. In effect, Griffiths thus had the possibility to cross-examine Zündel and disaster loomed on the horizon.

Zündel was certainly worthy of admiration but, by his refusal to condemn National Socialism, he convicted himself. His erudition, his unaffected eloquence, his sincerity, his  loftiness of vision were all forgotten, supplanted by his admiration for Adolf Hitler, as he saw him, and his compassion for the German homeland humiliated and insulted by the victors. Griffiths, haggard, nervous and, as we were to learn later, worn out by insomnia and excessive smoking, regained hope. In his summation he described Zündel as a dangerous Nazi. The judge, in his own final address to the jury, did likewise. The jury followed their lead. Zündel was found guilty for the distribution of Did Six Million Really Die? and not guilty for sending to individuals, outside of Canada, his aforementioned essay (“The West, War and Islam”). He was sentenced to 15 months’ imprisonment and forbidden to talk about the Holocaust.

In January 1987 a five-judge appeal panel decided to annul the 1985 trial, thus quashing the conviction. It did so on grounds of substance: Mr Locke had not allowed the defence any guarantee in the jury selection process; he had wrongly forbidden our experts to use documents, photos and various materials and had, in his final address, deceived the jury on the very meaning of the trial.

Zündel and the revisionists, once again, lost before the courts and won before history. To repeat that heroic man’s two phrases, his trial was indeed “the trial of the Nuremberg trial” and like “the exterminationists’ Stalingrad.” But I’m afraid that, unfortunately, Zündel’s life or health may one day succumb in this terrible ordeal; I fear so all the more as there looms on the horizon of 1988 a “second Zündel trial”, one even longer and heavier than that of 1985.

 

II. – Legal cases and other affairs

 

In France the period between September 1983 and September 1987 was one of relative calm in the legal repression against revisionism. The Jewish organisations, disappointed by the April 26, 1983 ruling against me, decided to attack revisionism via a circuitous route: they chose a German officer, Klaus Barbie, as their target and they had him convicted. Barbie’s trial and conviction have often been presented as a response to the rise of revisionism.

The print and broadcast media both played, in these circumstances, an essential role. Journalists orchestrated such a campaign against Klaus Barbie that the only possible outcome was the maximum sentence of the accused.

At the same time, over those four years they drummed up, repeatedly, what are called “affairs” (the “Roques affair”, the “Paschoud affair”, the “Le Pen affair” and several others), which for them were opportunities to call for a new legal repression. The most violent newspaper was Le Monde. On July 1, 1987, the French “federation of journalists’ associations” asked the legal authorities to punish the revisionists. On September 20 Charles Pasqua, minister of the Interior, said that I belonged in prison. A specific law against revisionism is being prepared: the “lex Faurissoniana”.

In the period in question three other events marked this rise of anti-revisionism: the showing of the film Shoah, the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Élie Wiesel and, finally, the opening, in Jerusalem, of the Demjanjuk trial.

With but one exception (the case of the Dalloz-Sirey law journal), the French courts persisted, albeit with growing misgiving, in their repression of revisionism, a repression demanded by the country’s journalists at the instigation of Claude Lanzmann.

I shall now go over those various legal and non-legal affairs in detail.

 

I win my lawsuit against the Dalloz-Sirey review

 

Not only were the Jewish organisations disappointed with the ruling against me of April 26, 1983, they were also unsettled by the fact that I, for my part, won a case against the law review Recueil Dalloz-Sirey (in first instance, on appeal and then in the Cour de Cassation). In France this journal has the reputation of being “the jurists’ bible”. It publishes, in particular, significant court decisions with commentaries called “notes under judgment”. Dalloz-Sirey had been keen to publish the text of the July 8, 1981 first instance decision against me (see its issue of February 3, 1982, p. 59-64); that decision, which was to be confirmed on appeal on April 26, 1983 but significantly modified as regards the substance of the case, was imbued, in my opinion, with a certain fervour to chastise; it was written by one of my three judges, Pierre Drai, who happens to be a Jew and a faithful subscriber to the monthly Information juive. But apparently judge Drai had not expressed himself quite harshly enough on my account. Now the writer chosen by Dalloz-Sirey to present the ruling of July 8, 1981 and comment on it in a lengthy “note under judgment” decided to go much further. He proceeded in two ways: 1) He falsified the text of the decision so as to smear me even more; 2) He drafted a “note under judgment” in a tone so violent and so vengeful that one might have thought it penned by Ilya Ehrenburg. This writer was a lawyer: an erstwhile Communist, of Jewish origin, Bernard Edelman. A friend of Pierre Vidal-Naquet, he presented me in his note as a champion of the “method of the absolute lie”.

The Dalloz-Sirey had never been successfully sued since its founding in the early 19^th century. This time it was held liable for “personal injury” for its manner of reproducing the July 8, 1981 decision. It had to publish the text of the decision against itself (issue of July 4, 1985, p. 375-376) and pay me… one French franc in damages. The first instance ruling came on November 23, 1983 and was upheld on appeal on March 8, 1985; the journal’s final recourse was rejected by the Cour de Cassation on December 15, 1986.

Edelman had achieved the feat of amputating the July 8, 1981 judgment of 57 percent of its content!

 

Ruinous effects of my trials

 

Almost invariably, when I win my cases, I am awarded one franc in damages, whereas when the other side wins, it gets significant if not indeed considerable sums from me.

The verbal attacks on my person became so violent and lie-ridden that I decided to go to court for two out of the thousands of possible cases. I sued, on the one hand, Jean Pierre-Bloch, head of the “International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism” (LICRA) and author of a book of memoirs in which I was presented as a Nazi and a falsifier, ruled against as such by the French courts, and, on the other, the communist party daily L’Humanité.

I lost those two cases and the ensuing appeals. The judges acknowledged that I’d been defamed but, they added, my adversaries had defamed me in good faith; in consequence, they had to win and I had to pay all costs. The Droit de Vivre (February 1985, p. 7), the LICRA’s organ, triumphantly headlined: “To call Faurisson a falsifier is to defame him, but in ‘good faith’”. This amounted to encouraging people to call me a falsifier everywhere, and that’s what happened.

The appeal ruling of April 26, 1983 ordered me to pay the costs of publishing an entire section of its text. The judges assessed the expense for this at 60,000 francs, “subject to a fairer assessment once estimates and invoices are examined”, which could mean that 60,000 francs was but a minimum. Without submitting the text to me, the LICRA had it published in the magazine Historia. This text was heavily falsified. I sued the LICRA and got one franc in compensation. On the other hand I had to pay, despite all, 20,000 francs for that false publication. About sixty thousand francs of my salary was garnished.

At present the LICRA is again demanding more money; it gets this money but keeps it all and still doesn’t publish the text of the 1983 ruling.

 

Barbie trial

 

The trial of Klaus Barbie and the hysteria it provoked were the occasion for new offences on the legal level. Barrister Jacques Vergès courageously defended Barbie who, in France, at the time of the acts for which he was charged, was only a German army lieutenant responsible for ensuring his compatriots’ safety. In 1939 we French had declared war on Germany, then, in 1940, we’d promised the German victors to collaborate with them. Had lieutenant Barbie acted in Lyon and its region with reprisals against the actions of the résistants, the communists and the Jews in the same way as do the Israeli authorities today against the Palestinians’ actions (that is, with bunches of 500-kilogram bombs), the losses in human lives and all sorts of destruction for the French population would have been rather more terrible than they were.

Jacques Vergès seems to have demonstrated that the famous telegram from Izieu (which is genuine, with nothing criminal about it) did not bear Klaus Barbie’s signature but, personally, I don’t have the documents that served as the basis for his demonstration and enabled him to affirm that Serge Klarsfeld had been the author of that fake; therefore I cannot take any stance on this point. On the other hand, I can say that at the trial in Lyon the German prosecutor Holtfort, there to testify for the prosecution, and André Cerdini, the presiding judge, used a truncated document: the Dannecker note of May 13, 1942. This note is to be found at the “Centre for Jewish documentation” in Paris as document XXVb-29. In it, Theodor Dannecker mentions in passing a chance conversation he had with Generalleutnant Kohl, the official in Paris in charge of rail transport; in the course of their talk Kohl appeared to Dannecker to be an “enemy” (Gegner) of the Jews, 100 per cent in agreement for “a final solution to the Jewish question with the goal of a total annihilation of the enemy” (eine Endlosung der Judenfrage mit dem Ziel restloser Vernichtung des Gegners). Presented this way, the sentence can lead one to believe that Dannecker and Kohl knew of the existence of a policy to exterminate the Jews. In reality, this sentence means that Kohl was 100 per cent in agreement to resolve the Jewish question definitively; the Jew is the enemy and, by definition, an enemy is to be annihilated. But it is not at all specified that it is a question here of physical annihilation, and indeed the following sentence, which is always omitted, provides clarification: Kohl “showed himself also to be an enemy of the political churches” (Er zeigte sich auch als Gegner der politischen Kirchen). The “enemy” camps are well marked out: on the one hand, Germany and, on the other, the Jews and the political churches. Kohl wanted to annihilate or eradicate the influence or power of those two enemies of Germany. In neither case was it a question of physical annihilation. The nine-word German sentence is always omitted and replaced with a three-dot ellipsis because it is too awkward for the exterminationists.

Among the historians who have proceeded with this trick I shall confine myself to these:

– Joseph Billig, “Le Cas du SS-Obersturmführer Kurt Lischka,” Le Monde juif, July-September 1974, p. 29; reprinted three years later in Billig’s La Solution finale de la question juive, Centre de documentation juive contemporaine, 1977, p. 94;

– Serge Klarsfeld, Le Mémorial de la deportation des juifs de France, 1978, p. 28;

– Georges Wellers, “Déportation des Juifs de France, Légendes et réalités,” Le Monde juif, July-September 1980, p. 97;

– Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, Basic Books, New York 1981, p. 351.

 

On the spot in Lyon I had an urgent note delivered to Jacques Vergès informing him of the nature of this deceit meant to have people believe that, if Kohl and Dannecker were aware of the extermination of the Jews, Barbie could not be unaware of it. Unfortunately Vergès had decided not to call the extermination dogma into question and, to the end, stuck by that policy of prudence. Just like so many German lawyers, he preferred to argue that Barbie “did not know” that the Jews were being exterminated.

 

On the margin of the Barbie trial

 

During the Barbie trial life became difficult for the revisionists, especially in Lyon where policemen and journalists were keeping a close watch. Several times the police summoned me for questioning, but I refused to report and declared that I preferred prison to “collaborating with the French police and courts in the repression of revisionism”. Threatened with arrest, I stayed firm. The film Shoah was showing in the cinemas; a play about the Auschwitz trial (Frankfurt, 1963-1965) was on at the theatre; in a large public square in Lyon the Jews organised an exhibition – essentially a symbolic one – on the Holocaust; in schools there was a vigorous indoctrination of pupils; the local press whipped up hatred of Barbie and the revisionists. Around the courthouse stood the security service with their walky-talkies, looking “just stern enough to discourage revisionist demonstrators” (Le Monde, June 18, 1987, p. 14).

The powder keg was ignited by the release, just before the opening of the trial (but this was mere coincidence), of the first issue of the Annales d’histoire révisionniste, and by a leaflet, informal and polemical in tone, entitled “Info-Intox… Histoire-Intox… ça suffit. CHAMBRES À GAZ = BIDON” (News-Intox… History-Intox… that’s enough. GAS CHAMBERS = FAKE) and signed by a “Lycéens’ collective of Lyon, Nancy, Strasbourg”; on its reverse side the leaflet bore drawings by the cartoonist Konk proving the chemical impossibility of the Auschwitz gassings.

This witch-hunt atmosphere, in which the daily Le Monde distinguished itself by its violence, sometimes had comical effects. Suddenly there was an apparent discovery of traces of revisionism in a schoolbook produced eight years before by a Jewish publishing house, which hastened to announce that the book would be reworked as soon as possible (Le Matin de Paris, May 21, 1987, p. 12; Le Monde, May 24-25, 1987, p. 10). A few days later Serge July, managing editor of Libération, on learning that two revisionist texts had slipped into the daily’s letters column, decided to have all copies of his own newspaper seized at the newsagents’, fired the letters editor forthwith and decided to overhaul the editorial board entirely (Libération, May 28, 1987, p. 34; May 29, 1987, p. 45; Le Monde, June 3, 1987, p. 48). Gaullist member of parliament Jacques Chaban-Delmas called upon French youth to mount a new form of resistance: resistance against revisionism (Rivarol, May 29, 1987, p. 8). Publishers of secondary school history books had already received advice and threats from the “Comité des enseignants amis d’Israël” (Friends of Israel teachers’ committee) (Sens, December 1986, p. 323-329) and there’s no doubt that, during the Barbie case, “school book publishers must not have remained insensitive to possible critical remarks or suggestions, failure to heed which might weigh on the distribution of their publications” (ibid., p. 325).

 

France’s journalists demand an immediate legal crackdown

 

Claude Lanzmann was distraught at the lack of success in France of his film Shoah and at the impossibility of attacking me in court for the article, rich in evidence and references, that I’d devoted to that monument of propaganda.^[5] Pierre Guillaume had, in effect, published and distributed that text under a title borrowed from a May 1968 slogan: “Open your eyes, smash the TV!”. Lanzmann turned to the Agence France-Presse (AFP) and got it to take an initiative that will live on in the history of the world press. On July 1, 1987 the AFP issued a lengthy statement expressing its agitation in the face of revisionist critiques made of Shoah and, accordingly, asked the judicial authorities to put “an immediate halt to the revisionists’ intrigues” in the name of… “respect for information and Human Rights”.

My analysis of Shoah was denounced as an infamy. The AFP release read as follows:

The Federation [i.e. the French federation of journalists’ associations] believes that individuals like Robert Faurisson should not be able, with impunity, to write what they are writing and disseminating. Vileness and racism have limits. The ethics of information forbid the ability to write just anything, the maddest anti-truths, in conscious contempt of the truth and thus of the right to know. To smear a film like Shoah, which can be viewed only with frightful dread and infinite compassion, amounts to a pure and simple infringement of Human Rights, writes the Federation, adding: “The journalist is always a witness to his times, and in this sense Claude Lanzmann has done an admirable journalistic job, garnering over ten years the most dreadful testimonies, not only of the victims, but also of their killers, and of Poles in the camps’ vicinity. It is horrible, and this is doubtless what bothers these revisionists, who apparently have still not got over the Nazi defeat.”

In the midst of the Barbie trial, and whilst attempts at revisionism are growing in number, it is urgent that the legal authorities, in the name of respect for information and Human Rights, should punish such abject leaflets and their authors, preventing them from repeating the offence.

The French federation of journalists’ associations brings together people from more than twenty concerns (notably TF1, A-2, FR-3, L’Agence France-Presse, Le Monde, Sud-Ouest, L’Equipe…), over 2,000 journalists in all.

 

This release was to have weighty consequences. TF-1, A-2, and FR-3 are the country’s three main television channels; the Agence France-Presse is our national news agency; Le Monde is the most prestigious of our newspapers; Sud-Ouest is the biggest selling daily; L’Équipe is the most read and most popular of the sporting papers. I thus found myself condemned by what one may well consider to be the whole of the mass media in my country; even the sport journalists were condemning revisionism. The revisionists were described as individuals with vile arguments, spreading infamy and racism, writing just any rubbish – the maddest anti-truths –, despising the truth and the public’s right to know, violating human rights and still not having got over the Nazi defeat. In particular, the revisionists were seen as smearing an unimpeachable and admirable film, which no-one could view without frightful dread and infinite compassion.

Seizure of the Annales d’histoire révisionniste and criminal proceedings (in the town of Auch)

Thus did the mainstream media unanimously call the judges to their rescue. Le Monde stood out by the violence of its attacks; in a span of less than two months it mentioned the revisionists in over twenty articles, uniformly hostile; Bruno Frappat denounced, for his part, the “big experts at lying, the gangsters of history” (Le Monde, July 5-6, 1987, p. 31).

The legal machine immediately restarted. On May 25, 1987, with remarkable promptness, the judge of the court of urgent applications (référés) in Paris, Gérard Pluyette, through the intervention of Jean Pierre-Bloch, had already ordered the seizure of the first issue of the Annales. On July 3 a certain Legname, investigating magistrate in Auch (a town in the Gers département), charged me with justifying war crimes and spreading false news on the basis of my two articles in that journal, one entitled How the British obtained the confessions of Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz and the other Le savon juif (The Jewish soap). Pierre Guillaume was charged on the same grounds, since he was the Annales‘ publisher. Carlo Mattogno was also charged for his study on “The Myth of the extermination of the Jews”; an Italian citizen, he became, on August 10, 1987, the object of an international arrest warrant. This whole process had been set in motion by a certain Robin, public prosecutor in Auch, at the request of Madame Lydie Dupuis, an official of the “League for Human Rights” and family relation of president François Mitterrand.

On September 20, 1987 Charles Pasqua, minister of the Interior, stated on the radio that, if it depended on him alone, Professor Faurisson’s place would be in prison (“Charles Pasqua: Les thèses révisionnistes, véritable délit”, Le Figaro, September 21, 1987, p. 7).

A specific law is currently in preparation against the revisionists (“lex Faurissoniana”); the bill is even more severe than the German law of June 1985 (the Auschwitzlüge-Gesetz).

There were a number of non-legal affairs; in France the most important of these was the Le Pen affair.

 

Roques affair

 

I shall not dwell on the Roques affair since Henri Roques, who is here with us, will be basing his own presentation on it. For my part I shall only note one aspect of it that illustrates revisionism’s progress. In February 1979 Léon Poliakov and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, both of Jewish origin, were able to mobilise thirty-two persons, presented as “historians”, to sign a petition, the so-called “declaration of 34 historians”, against me (Le Monde, February 21, 1979, p. 23); some of those thirty-two were not of Jewish origin. In 1986 François Bédarida, a Christian of Jewish birth, managed to mobilise against Henri Roques only five “historians” (Pierre Vidal-Naquet and four others also of Jewish origin), a rabbi and, finally, a media figure called Harlem Désir, who is himself perhaps of Jewish origin as well (see Libération, May 31, 1986, p. 12; Le Monde, June 3, 1986, p. 14).

 

Paschoud affair (Switzerland)

 

In Switzerland, the Paschoud affair erupted. Mariette Paschoud, 39, lives in Lausanne. She used to teach history and literature at a lycée there. She is also a captain in the Swiss army and an auxiliary military judge. She visited Paris to preside over a conference at which Henri Roques was to talk about his doctoral thesis on the Gerstein confessions. While not taking up the cudgels for the revisionist case, she did plead for the right to doubt and to do research. The Swiss press went into so violent a rage against this lovely woman that the authorities of the Vaud canton, her employers, felt they had to take swift sanctions: Mariette Paschoud no longer had the right to teach history. But local rabbi Vadnaï deemed the sanction insufficient. A new campaign was unleashed, and now Mrs Paschoud no longer has the right to teach either history or literature; her husband has been dismissed by the private school where he taught courses in law.

 

Noyon affair (Switzerland)

Still in Switzerland, Pierre Guillaume and I were invited to attend a documentary film festival in Noyon, and there we went. The organisers had had the idea of setting a trap for us: they were going to invite exterminationist historians to match us, and also show the films Night and Fog and Le Temps du ghetto. On learning that we’d arrived, the exterminationists sent a telegram at the last moment; they refused to meet us, and the whole operation turned to our advantage despite a scandal triggered at the end by a local television celebrity who, noting our grip on the audience, shouted that he found our performance “obscene”. A few Swiss newspapers put the event in their front-page headlines. The festival’s organisers discovered, albeit a bit late, the “serious and dangerous” character of revisionism.

Afterwards, Pierre Guillaume returned to Switzerland with Henri Roques to hold a conference. The conference took place in difficult conditions and, subsequently, the Swiss government pronounced the barring of Guillaume and Roques from its territory (and from Liechtenstein) for a period of three and a half years (Le Monde, December 6, 1986, p. 7).

 

Konk affair

 

Konk (real name: Laurent Fabre) is a famous cartoonist. He started out at Le Monde and then worked for the weekly L’Evénement du jeudi, run by Jean-François Kahn. He is considered a leftist. He has also shown himself to be a revisionist. In a cartoon book entitled Aux Voleurs! (Albin Michel, Paris 1986), denouncing thievery, lies and imposture in different forms he has, in a few drawings and captions, aptly summed up my argumentation on the chemical impossibility of the Auschwitz “gassings”. I recommend a perusal of the last three pages to those who’d like to have a forceful summary of revisionism that even schoolchildren can understand and enjoy.^[6]  

Konk was ousted from L’Evénement du jeudi by J.-F. Kahn. Recently he gave an interview in which he made a sort of retraction (Le Nouvel Observateur, September 25, 1987, p. 93). On the eve of its publication he rang me up to alert me and, at the same time, to explain that, driven out from everywhere and finding no work, he’d found himself reduced to that extremity. From time to time Le Figaro still publishes a cartoon of his but no real contract links the paper and the cartoonist. 

 

Folco affair

 

Michel Folco is an investigative reporter and photographer. He works chiefly for a satirical monthly, Zéro, run by the author and journalist Cavanna, of slightly anarchist inspiration. Under a seeming airiness Folco is a scrupulous and meticulous investigator. Having begun with an inquiry into Mauthausen, he has ended up gathering a volume of new information on the controversy between revisionists and exterminationists, information that future historians will not be able to ignore. His interviews with Georges Wellers, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Germaine Tillion throw light on a whole hidden face of the exterminationist camp. It’s regrettable that Cavanna should have put an abrupt end to those articles by Folco for fear of the reactions aroused among certain persons (see, in particular, Zéro, April 1987, p. 51-57, and May 1987, p. 70-75).

 

Union of Atheists affair

 

The Holocaust is a religion. It’s incumbent to try to protect oneself against its triumphant and intolerant character.

I wanted to know whether it was possible to conduct an action against this religion within the ranks of the French Union of Atheists, which brings together about 2,500 persons. I joined the Union of Atheists, as its charter specifies anyone can do without any conditions, not even a fee to pay. The charter also states that no-one can be expelled. My membership caused a stir, which the mainstream press amplified. There ensued a hundred resignations in protest against my entry. The president, Albert Beaughon, asked me to tender my resignation. I refused.

The annual congress of the Union of Atheists took place in a tumult. I maintained my refusal and awaited what might follow. To take a phrase from Pierre Guillaume, “those atheists wanted to excommunicate me because I wasn’t Catholic enough”. But I must also say I’ve noted that a fair number of atheists, within this association, have defended me out of a concern for tolerance and, sometimes, from revisionist conviction (see, in particular, Libération, June 6-7, 1987, and June 8, 1987, p. 18).

 

Michel Polac and Annette Levy-Willard affairs

 

Michel Polac is a star of French television. Of Jewish background, he has always militated against revisionism. For some years he’d been attacking me again and again. In May 1987 he stated on television that I deserved a slap in the face. On September 12 he showed a short excerpt from a video-film by Annette Levy-Willard, L’Espion qui venait de l’extrême droite (known in English as The Other Face of Terror), devoted in part to our IHR conference of September 1983. In June 1983 Annette Levy-Willard beseeched me to give her the address of the California hotel where that gathering was to be held. With Willis Carto’s authorisation, the address was sent to her in September. At the venue her interviews were conducted in such a way and with such animosity towards revisionism that I myself refused to grant her one. Instead, I offered to make a one-minute statement before her camera. She accepted, but once I was on camera she hindered me from making my statement. I left, refusing to answer her questions. Furious, Mrs Levy-Willard shouted at me in the lobby of the Grand Hotel of Anaheim, saying several times that she would have her revenge; Tom Marcellus, our director, was there. The lady’s vengeance took the form of that video-film, in which she claimed to have discovered us holding secretly, in Los Angeles, a gathering of neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klansmen. I was seen, she said, trying to hide (sic!).

Michel Polac had promised, at the end of his programme, that the following week he would accord a right of reply to persons who felt a need to present their defence. I therefore made my request, by telephone, to do so, but it was refused. In Paris that following week, accompanied by my two lawyers, I proceeded to the entrance of Polac’s recording studios. Polac, quite simply, had the guards bar us entry and sent for the police, who soon arrived in both plainclothes and uniform.

 

Jacques Chancel and Gilbert Salomon affair

 

Jacques Chancel is another star of French radio and television. He invited me to come on the radio, on September 18, 1987, and face a certain Gilbert Salomon. I readily accepted. On arriving in Paris I learned that my presence on that broadcast would be “intolerable”, and had to return to Vichy. The programme was thus a discussion between Jacques Chancel, Gilbert Salomon, journalist Michel Meyer and a few other persons who were resolutely anti-revisionist. The absentee, myself, was copiously insulted. Gilbert Salomon went so far as to admit that, had I been there, he would probably have struck me. He was introduced by his “close friend and almost brother” Jacques Chancel as having been interned at Auschwitz for exactly two years to the day, from April 11, 1943 to April 11, 1945; Salomon claimed he was the sole survivor of a convoy of 1,100 Jews.

The truth is that he’d arrived in Auschwitz on May 1, 1944, more than a year after the date he gave on the radio, that he’d been transferred from there to Buchenwald, where he was freed in April 1945, that his convoy had included 1,004 Jews and that Serge Klarsfeld, despite his manipulation of statistics, was indeed bound to acknowledge, in his “Memorial to the deportation of the Jews from France” (and its Additifs), that from 1945 at least 51 Jews from that convoy had spontaneously gone to the Ministry for prisoners of war to declare that they were alive. What’s more, I discovered that Salomon was recorded by Serge Klarsfeld among… the gassed! Therefore the name of Gilbert Salomon, a millionaire known today in France as “the meat king”, appears as that of a gassing victim on a monument in Jerusalem featuring all the names given in the aforementioned “Memorial”, as though it were a matter of Jews having all died in deportation.

Le Pen affair

 

Jean-Marie Le Pen is head of the Front National, a French populist movement that has more than thirty members in parliament.^[7] He will be a presidential candidate in May 1988. On September 13, 1987, on the television discussion programme “RTL-Le Monde Grand Jury”, he was suddenly questioned on “the theses of Messrs Faurisson and Roques”. In his reply he said:

I’m very interested in the history of the Second World War. I’ve asked myself a certain number of questions about it. I do not say that the gas chambers didn’t exist. I myself haven’t been able to see any. I have not made any special study of the matter. But I believe they are a footnote [point de detail] to the history of the Second World War.

One must listen carefully to the full recording of this rather confused interview in order to grasp the situation in which Le Pen found himself and the sense of his thought. The transcripts given in the press are faulty. I personally listened, word for word, to Le Pen’s statements and those of the journalists who interrupted him on several occasions. For me, it’s clear that the interviewee, from the first question, lost his composure; he became cognisant of the gravity of the subject broached and a chasm opened under his feet. He regained control as he spoke but the journalists’ interruptions made him lose his train of thought. Le Pen used the phrase “point de detail.”^[8] The phrase was regrettable and conveyed poorly what he was trying to say. For what he was trying to say is what many exterminationists would, in discussions I myself happened to have with them, end up saying to me: “Whether there were gas chambers or not, it’s just a detail.” Twenty times I’d heard proponents of the exterminationist case use that argument upon finally realising, in the midst of discussion, that the gas chambers, after all, might not have existed. Le Pen, for his part, defended the opinion that the means for eliminating the Jews were but a detail compared with the result, i.e. that elimination. In effect, if one admits that there’s been, for example, a murder, then the weapon used will be of only relative importance in comparison with the murder itself. It’s ironic that an argument used by the exterminationists to defend their thesis of the Jews’ extermination should be imputed as a crime to Le Pen, whom some suspected – not without reason, in my view – of revisionism.

Another irony is that no revisionist will agree with Le Pen in saying that the gas chambers are a footnote to the history of the Second World War. In effect, without that specific weapon used to carry it out, the specific crime of genocide is materially inconceivable. Without a system of destruction there is no systematic destruction. Without the gas chamber, there is no more Jewish Holocaust. The gas chambers are therefore not a footnote.

One last irony is that Claude Malhuret, minister for defence of human rights, should have said in response to Le Pen that “the gas chambers are one of the keys to 20^th century history” (Libération, September 15, 1987, p. 6). Every revisionist will agree with that concept, except that it’s a question of the key… to a lie. The gas chambers are an essential myth, an essential lie. The gas chambers are less than a footnote, since they didn’t even exist, but the myth of the gas chambers is indeed “one of the keys to 20^th century history”.

Five days after his statement Le Pen more or less retracted it. In a clarification intended for the press, he mentioned “the gas chambers” as one weapon, amongst others, in which he said he believed. But the press, in its ardour to overwhelm him, didn’t care to hear those explanations.

On the whole, for the revisionists the balance of the Le Pen affair is positive: thanks to this politician, all Frenchmen have heard talk of those who doubt the existence of the gas chambers and know now, if somewhat confusedly, that those sceptics call themselves “revisionists”. Today, when a stranger, in the course of a conversation on the Second World War, tries to place me, it’s enough for me to say: “I’m a revisionist.” Before the Le Pen affair that label would have been understood by only a tiny number of Frenchmen.

The exterminationists can no longer uphold the argument that they’d recently tended to use more and more in order to get out of trouble; they can no longer say: “The gas chambers are a footnote.” The gas chambers are going to become their tunic of Nessus; they will be bound to uphold, to the very end, an unsustainable argument (that of the gas chambers’ existence) as one seeks to uphold the central pillar of a whole edifice (here, an edifice of lies).

 

Revisionists barred from the media

 

My “score” on French television is simple: in nine years I’ve been seen and heard a single time, for from 30 to 40 seconds; that was one evening in June 1987 at 10:15 p.m., on the third national channel. The presenter, Jacqueline Alexandre, took care, moreover, to advise viewers that I was a sort of monster and, after my appearance, she confirmed for them that they’d just seen and heard a sort of monster. The radio and newspapers, of course, are forbidden to us. Rarely have such a small group of men had people talk about them – and only negatively – to such an extent without being able to offer a defence.

In nine years I’ve never been able to give a single truly public talk in France. Even some of my “by-invitation” conferences haven’t been able to go ahead, and this due to police intervention (for example, in Périgueux at the request of Yves Guena and, in Bordeaux, at that of Jacques Chaban-Delmas, both “Gaullist” right members of parliament). In France, the revisionists play the role of the devil: they are much spoken about, always negatively, but they are never seen. On the other hand, I’ve stopped counting the physical assaults that Pierre Guillaume, myself and a few other revisionists have sustained. Personally, I believe I could ask to be put down in the Guinness Book of World Records as the University professor most often insulted in the whole Western press.

 

Three Shoah-Business events

 

Three spectacular events have at times been presented in the French press as a retort to the rise of revisionism: the showing in cinemas of Shoah, the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Élie Wiesel and the Demjanjuk trial in Jerusalem.

 

1. Shoah

 

I shall not go over here the case of Shoah, with which I dealt in an article published as a supplement to the Annales d’histoire révisionniste (n° 4, p. 169-177), entitled by Pierre Guillaume “Ouvrez les yeux, cassez la télé!” (Open your eyes, smash the TV!) [see, by R. Faurisson, Shoah, a film by Claude Lanzmann: towards a crash of Shoah business… – editor’s note]. In France the film experienced such a failure in relation to the publicity it enjoyed in all ways imaginable that one can, in my opinion, speak of a “crash of Shoah-business”. I’ll mention just one interview in the French weekly VSD in which Claude Lanzmann revealed, not without pleasure, the deceptive methods he had used to question the German “witnesses” seen in his film (VSD, July 9, 1987, p. 11). He had made up a new name for himself, Claude-Marie Sorel, along with a title – doctor of history – and an Institute: “le Centre de recherches et d’études pour l’histoire contemporaine”. He’d also prepared sheets of paper fraudulently bearing the letterhead: “Académie de Paris” (he must have known that his friend Mme Ahrweiler, rector of the Academy, would not have him sued) and, finally, he’d paid his witnesses handsomely: 3,000 deutschmarks, or about 10,000 French francs, per head. Claude Lanzmann is going to take part, in December 1987, in the international symposium at the Sorbonne organised by Mme Ahrweiler against the French revisionists.

 

2. Élie Wiesel receives the Nobel Peace Prize (Oslo)

In December 1986 Élie Wiesel received the Nobel Peace Prize. On the front page of Le Monde’s issue of October 17, 1986, under the headline “An Eloquent Nobel”, it was emphasised that this reward came just at the right time for:

In the last few years there has been seen, in the name of an alleged “historical revisionism”, a development of arguments, notably in France, questioning the existence of the Nazi gas chambers and, perhaps beyond that, of the Jewish genocide itself.

In my September 1983 IHR conference paper I said:

Élie Wiesel, if I may be allowed to use a familiar expression, is suffering from an awful thorn in his foot: the revisionist thorn. He’s tried by every means to get rid of it. He hasn’t succeeded. He doesn’t see how he’ll be able to get rid of it – sees less and less how, in fact. In this respect he’s like the revisionists who don’t see at all how Élie Wiesel will get rid of the revisionist thorn, either.

In May 1986 I published a piece entitled Un grand faux témoin: Élie Wiesel (A Prominent False Witness: Élie Wiesel). In it I recalled that, in his autobiography (Night), this great witness of Auschwitz didn’t even mention the existence of “gas chambers” at Auschwitz. For him, the Germans did exterminate the Jews but… by fire, throwing them alive into open air furnaces right in front of all the deportees. I could have added that in January 1945, after being offered by the Germans the choice between remaining in the camp to await the arrival of the Soviets and evacuating, accompanied by his guards, Élie Wiesel had chosen to leave with the German “exterminators” rather than to welcome the Soviet “liberators”. He and his father had both taken the same decision, whilst both could have remained at one of the camp hospitals, the young Élie as a pampered convalescent after a minor operation and his father either as a phoney patient or a phoney orderly (Night, Hill and Wang, New York 1960, p. 82-87).

In December 1986 Pierre Guillaume, Serge Thion and I went to Oslo for the Nobel Prize ceremonies. The text A Prominent False Witness: Élie Wiesel was distributed on the spot in French, English and Swedish, even to certain political figures of the highest standing, amongst whom Mrs Danièle Mitterrand, as well as to Wiesel himself.

 

3. Demjanjuk trial (Israel)

 

The Demjanjuk trial illustrates, one more time, the law according to which the lawyers of “Nazis” or their “accomplices” play the accusers’ game. Here, those lawyers refuse to call into question the extermination dogma and act as though they really believed Treblinka was an extermination camp. In reality it was a very modest transit camp, with nothing secret about it. It was built, 90 kilometres from Warsaw, near a small railway line serving a sand quarry. A simple topographical study would demolish in a few minutes the myth of the formidable secret gassings and the no less formidable open-air incinerations of from 700,000 to 1,500,000 Jews. But the “paper historians”, like the Jerusalem judges and lawyers, will not dare to begin at the beginning, that is, with a study of the site of the historic “crime”. “Treblinka” has become the pinnacle of the great historical lie, even more than “Auschwitz.”^[9] 

 

      III. – Gains of historical revisionism

 

In January 1987 a well-known Jewish weekly wrote:

For Henri Roques, Mariette Paschoud, Pierre Guillaume and Robert Faurisson, 1986 was a very successful year. In France and in Switzerland their names were on everyone’s lips. (Allgemeine Jüdische Wochenzeitung, January 23, 1987, p. 12).

In fact, the entire period I’m dealing with here (September 1983 to September 1987) was a prosperous one for European revisionism. In a more general way, if what happened in the United States, Canada and Europe is taken into account, one can say that over those four years the advances of revisionism were significant, whilst the decline of the exterminationists worsened.

 

Advances of revisionism

 

On July 4, 1984 an arsonist attack completely ravaged our Institute for Historical Review, located in Torrance, California. Willis Carto, Tom Marcellus and their team succeeded, at the cost of considerable efforts, in bringing our institute back to life – a necessarily slower life. In spite of that fire and in spite of the adverse effects of the operation led by Mel Mermelstein, the Journal of Historical Review is now at its 28^th edition. In France, Pierre Guillaume has created a quarterly journal, the Annales d’histoire révisionniste; the first issue, seized by the police, caused a sensation; the big press and even television mentioned its content and, in particular, Carlo Mattogno’s study The Myth of the Extermination of the Jews. In 1986 Pierre Guillaume likewise published his own book, Droit et histoire, as well as the French translation-adaptation of Wilhelm Stäglich’s Der Auschwitz Mythos with a 25-page supplement in which I myself comment on photos and documents relating to that myth.

France is the first country in the world where it’s been possible to defend a revisionist doctoral thesis (in June 1985): that of Henri Roques on the Gerstein confessions. In the same year there appeared in Italy C. Mattogno’s Il rapporto Gerstein, anatomia di un falso (The Gerstein Report, anatomy of a fraud), a work more in-depth and complete than Roques’s thesis (which claimed to do no more than study the texts attributed to Gerstein). Mattogno is an erudite scholar in the mould of his Renaissance predecessors; he is meticulous and prolific; in the future he will appear in the front rank of the revisionists. It’s possible that, in the years to come, the Spaniard Enrique Aynat Eknes will attain the same level for his work on Auschwitz.^[10] In two years’ time the Frenchman Pierre Marais will doubtless be publishing the outcome of his research on the myth of the homicidal gas vans [a book indeed published in 1994, with a preface by R. Faurisson, under the title Les camions à gaz en question; Paris, Polémiques – editor’s note]. In the US, our Institute has released the works of Walter Sanning (The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry) and James J. Martin, dean of revisionist historians (author of The Man Who Invented Genocide). The English translation of the Stäglich book is currently in preparation [this was indeed published in 1986 by the IHR under the title Auschwitz: A Judge Looks at the Evidence; second edition 1990 – editor’s note].

 

Tribute from Michel de Boüard

 

Michel de Boüard was interned at Mauthausen during the war. Professor of medieval history and, also, member of the Committee for the history of the Second World War (Paris), he ended his university career as dean of the faculty of letters at the University of Caen (Normandy). He is a member of the Institut de France. In 1986 he took up the defence of Henri Roques and, more generally, criticised the exterminationist literature and expressed his esteem for the quality of revisionist studies. A journalist from Ouest-France asked him:

You were president of the Calvados (Normandy) association of deportees, and you resigned in May 1985. Why was that?

De Boüard answered:

I found myself torn between my conscience as a historian and the duties that it imposes, and, on the other hand, my membership in a group of companions whom I love deeply but who do not wish to recognise the need to deal with the wartime deportation as a historical fact in line with the methods of a sound History.

I’m haunted by the thought that, in 100 years from now or even 50, historians will question themselves on that particular aspect of the Second World War which is the concentration camp system and what they will discover. The dossier is rotten. On the one hand, a huge amount of fantasies, inaccuracies, obstinately repeated (notably as regard numbers), amalgamations, generalisations and, on the other hand, very closely argued critical studies to demonstrate the inanity of those exaggerations. I’m afraid those historians may then say that the deportation, in the end, must have been a myth. There’s the danger. This idea haunts me. (Ouest-France, August 2-3 1986, p. 6)

 

The revisionists, whom others doggedly denounce as negative minds, perform a positive function: they show what really happened. They also give a lesson in “positivism” in the sense that their arguments are often of a physical, chemical, topographical, architectural and documentary order and because they call true only that which is verifiable. They defend history, whilst their adversaries have abandoned history for what the Jews call “remembrance” – i.e., their mythological tradition.

 

Decline of exterminationism

 

In the years 1983-1987 the exterminationist thesis has seen in its favour a financial, political and media mobilisation as impressive as it’s been ineffective.

 

A moral disaster for Hilberg, Vrba, Wiesel and Lanzmann

 

For Raul Hilberg, Rudolf Vrba, Élie Wiesel and Claude Lanzmann these years have been rich in money, publicity and various honours but disastrous in terms of moral credit.

– Raul Hilberg, the best “expert” of the exterminationist thesis, caved in at the Toronto trial and committed such an act of perjury that, in my view, he will not run the risk involved in coming back to testify at a similar trial;^[11]  

– Rudolf Vrba, the number one witness for the exterminationist thesis, has proved to be a sort of impostor: he himself had to concur at the Toronto trial that his written “testimony” was, in large part – if not, perhaps, altogether – a work of fiction;

– Élie Wiesel, the most illustrious of Shoah-business’s travelling salesmen, is discredited amongst his fellows. Some months after a first publication and a significant distribution of my article A Prominent False Witness: Élie Wiesel, Pierre Vidal-Naquet himself was led to declare:

For example, you have Rabbi Kahane, that extremist Jew, who is less dangerous than a man like Élie Wiesel, who says just any rubbish… Reading some of the descriptions in Night is enough to realise that they’re not accurate and that he ends up turning himself into a Shoah merchant… Indeed, he too does wrong, and an immense wrong, to the historical truth. (Zéro, April 1987, p. 57)

– Claude Lanzmann was awaited like the Messiah. For ten years he’d been promising to answer the revisionist arguments definitively with his film Shoah; however, in France, that film had the opposite effect; it rendered the dearth of rational arguments for exterminationism obvious and restarted revisionism to such a point that, panic-stricken, Lanzmann, through the French “federation of journalists’ associations”, called for legal repression against the revisionists.

“Functionalism” is a sizeable concession made to revisionism, and the “intentionalists” have, so to speak, disappeared.

 

A ten-point bankruptcy assessment

 

Exterminationism’s bankruptcy assessment can be drawn up in these terms: the exterminationists are henceforth bound to acknowledge that no documents (either German or Allied) are to be found to defend their thesis:

1) neither any order to exterminate the Jews;
2) nor any plan for carrying out that extermination;
3) nor anything regarding a centralising entity to coordinate the carrying out of that extermination;
4) nor any budget; however, nothing is ever done without money or credits;
5) nor any monitoring body; however, in a country at war, all must be closely monitored;
6) nor any weapon, for there exists no expert examination of the crime weapon: either the homicidal gas chamber or the homicidal gas van;
7) nor any corpse, for no post mortem proving any killing by poison gas is to be had;
8) nor any account of the reconstruction of the crime, whereas in France a murder investigation is usually accompanied by a reconstruction of the crime scene;
9) nor any witness cross-examined on the material nature of the crime for, at the Toronto trial (1985), where, for the first time, someone dared to conduct such a cross-examination, the best “witnesses” were confounded;
10) nor any verified admission, for the Gerstein confessions and the admissions of Rudolf Höss, once finally analysed, have shown themselves to be devoid of value and impossible to defend, even in the eyes of a Raul Hilberg.

 

I’m afraid the brevity and rapidity of this listing may obscure the importance of each of the ten elements. I shall therefore dwell for a moment on the first: the absence – today admitted by all – of an order to exterminate the Jews.

From 1945 to 1980 those who dared utter the idea that there’d never been such an order were vilified. Either that order existed and had to be shown, or it didn’t exist, and the fact had to be agreed on: that’s what common sense says, but it’s also what nobody among the spectators to the controversy (journalists, historians, professors) dared to say. For 35 years the exterminationists maintained an imposture. They blocked historical research and paralysed any good-sense reaction. The lesson deserves some pondering. The Waldheim affair, to take that one example, merely repeats this lesson: if lieutenant Waldheim rendered himself guilty of a “war crime” or of a “crime against humanity”, then Edgar Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress, must tell us precisely what that crime of which he accuses Waldheim is, and must present appropriate evidence. All the rest is just media noise, intellectual terrorism or production of false documents.

 

Revision of “Wannsee”

 

For more than 35 years we were told to believe that the Wannsee meeting (20 January 1942) planned the extermination of the Jews. Then, without a word being said, that claim was abandoned. The document in itself, i.e. the minutes, is suspect. Many revisionists refuse, consequently, to ascribe the least value to it. That was the case with me, but now no longer. I believe above all that this document was poorly read, by me included. We were all victims of such psychological conditioning that we were unable to see, in the two crucial paragraphs, words like Freilassung (freeing) and Aufbaues (revival), along with the sentence in parentheses: Siehe die Erfahrung der Geschichte (“See the experience of history”).^[12] In the light of these words, which authors sometimes cause to disappear when claiming to reproducing the minutes, I say that what Reinhard Heydrich envisaged at the Berlin-Wannsee gathering was a setting free (Freilassung) of those Jews who would survive the war and a Jewish revival (jüdischen Aufbaues) after the terrible trials of the war and forced labour; history is full of such physical and moral trials from which a people is said to emerge regenerated. The National Socialists, in this respect close to the Zionists, thought that after the war “the best” among the Jews would constitute an elite: the germ cell of a Jewish renewal in which physical labour, farming colonies, the feeling of a common destiny would allow the creation of a Jewish national home; the Jews would at last constitute a nation among other nations, instead of being “parasites”. I shall recall here that in March 1942, and perhaps after that date, there was at least one kibbutz at Neuendorf, in National Socialist Germany (Documents on the Holocaust, Yad Vashem, 1981, p. 155).

 

Hilberg and Browning reduced to “nothing”

The exterminationists’ decline over a period of 35 years can be measured in their successive explanations of the order purportedly given by Hitler to exterminate the Jews. At first they let us believe there was a written order, then that order was presented as verbal; today we’re asked to believe that that order consisted in a simple “nod” (sic) of the head of Hitler who, by virtue of a consensus-mind reading, was apparently understood at once by an entire bureaucracy. We owe the “nod” theory to Christopher Browning^[13] and that of the consensus-mind reading to Raul Hilberg. We thus attain the domain of nothing. Hilberg, originally a proponent of the written order theory (and even of two written orders), had first realised that he could supply no proof of the existence of that order (or of those orders). Subsequently, around 1984, he realised that the theory of the verbal order was indefensible, too; at the Stuttgart symposium (May 3-5, 1984), he in effect took up as his own a revisionist argument and stated, with regard to the verbal order purportedly received by Eichmann or Höss:

Eichmann und Höss haben nicht selbst mit dem Führer gesprochen. So hören wir nur von einem Mann wie Eichmann, der von Heydrich gehört hatte, der von Himmler gehört hatte, was Hitler gesagt hatte. Für Geschichtsschreiber ist das allerdings nicht die beste Quelle. (Der Mord an den Juden im Zweiten Weltkrieg [The Murder of the Jews in the Second World War], DVA, 1985, p. 187).

(Eichmann and Höss did not themselves speak with the Führer. So we learn only from a man – Eichmann – who heard what Hitler had said from Heydrich, who had heard it from Himmler. For the historian, this is certainly not the best source.)

Klarsfeld reduced to trickery, and admission

 

Serge Klarsfeld has involuntarily contributed to exterminationism’s decline. In order to defend the thesis of the alleged homicidal gassings at Auschwitz-Birkenau, he was reduced to using a crude deception.

In 1980 he published an album of about 190 photographs taken at Auschwitz in 1944 by a German photographer. A certain number of these photos were already known. The whole set should have been published already in 1945; it was so rich in information that I personally know of nothing more enlightening on the reality of Auschwitz than these astonishing photographs. Klarsfeld gave the first, relatively honest edition the title The Auschwitz Album / Lili Jacob’s Album (Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, New York, preface dated August 5, 1980). This edition was not released commercially but was, it seems, reserved for distribution “to major libraries around the world, as well as to major Jewish organisations”.

In the following year he published the same photographs under the title: The Auschwitz Album / A Book Based Upon an Album Discovered by a Concentration Camp Survivor, Lili Meier, text by Peter Hellman (Random House, New York 1981). This time the book’s presentation and the commentary on the photos were lacking in honesty.

It was with the French edition that Klarsfeld lapsed into trickery pure and simple. It must be said that he was helped in this by an odd character: a pharmacist called Jean-Claude Pressac, whose services even Georges Wellers, who had at first employed him, had eventually declined. The title was: L’Album d’Auschwitz, d’après un album découvert par Lili Meier, survivante du camp de concentration (text by Peter Hellman, translated from the English by Guy Casaril, French edition established and completed by Anne Freyer and Jean-Claude Pressac; Seuil, Paris 1983). The order of the images was changed drastically with a view to illustrate the exterminationist thesis. Some titles of the original album’s various sections had been transformed; new titles had even been forged so as to have the reader take them for original ones; the commentaries were purely arbitrary. A map of Birkenau had been added (page 42), but that map was deliberately falsified. So it was that, to have one believe that the groups of Jewish women and children surprised by the photographer between crematoria II and III could proceed no further, and were thus going to end up in those crematoria’s “gas chambers”, Klarsfeld and Pressac had quite simply removed the representation of a path that, in reality, continued up to the large shower facility (situated beyond the crematoria area, and towards which the women and children were actually walking). Another subterfuge consisted in suppressing any mention of the existence of a football ground (Sportplatz) adjacent to crematorium III: that playing field hardly squared with the vicinity of a place where, supposedly, every day, thousands of Jews were gassed.

On May 29, 1986, in an interview with the weekly VSD (p. 37), Klarsfeld admitted that no “real proof” of the gas chambers’ existence had yet been published, only, as he said, “beginnings of proof that embarrassed the Faurissonians but hadn’t yet reduced them to silence”. Thus, by the very admission of that famous avenger of the gas chamber victims, the whole world had been obliged to believe in those gas chambers, without any published proof that they’d existed, in any case up until May 1986, i.e. for more than forty years from the end of the war! This was to admit implicitly that Georges Wellers had not published any “real proof” in his 1981 book Les Chambres à gaz ont existé / Des documents, des témoignages, des chiffres (Gallimard, Paris); in effect, what that book demonstrated was the existence of crematory ovens. Klarsfeld, with that statement, also acknowledged the failure of another book: Les Chambres à gaz, secret d’État (24 authors, including Wellers, Éditions de Minuit, Paris 1984; original German edition, published by Fischer Verlag in 1983: NS Massentötungen durch Giftgas [NS mass murders by poison gas]). In effect, that work was based on the following theory: as the gas chambers were the greatest of all possible secrets, a State secret, people shouldn’t expect to discover proof in the ordinary sense of the word. The cover of the book showed… a can of Zyklon. In line with a phrase I heard from the late professor Michel de Boüard himself, “in this book they shoot us like a firing squad with their references and there are essentially no sources”. I myself would add that those references have no scientific value; they refer back, for the most part, to statements of German prosecutors or judges about Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, etc. However, what’s concealed from us is that all those statements have a common source: a little German agency located in Ludwigsburg and run at the time in question by Adalbert Rückerl (Landesjustizverwaltung zur Aufklärung von NS-Verbrechen). In other words, Rückerl, one of the book’s main authors, constantly cites himself to prove that he’s right!

In 1987 the journalist Michel Folco paid me a visit. I showed him the Klarsfeld interview. I pointed out that I’d sent the weekly VSD a “right of reply” text that was, in the end, refused. Folco later went on to visit, on the one hand, Georges Wellers and, on the other, Serge Klarsfeld. Wellers was aware of that interview with Klarsfeld in VSD and found it regrettable and deplorable. There ensued a commotion at the end of which Klarsfeld, on March 23, 1987 – ten months after the interview –, sent a denial, but a denial amounting to a confirmation and which, instead of appearing in VSD, came out in George Wellers’s review Le Monde juif (January-March 1987, p. 1). In it Klarsfeld wrote:

It is obvious that in the years since 1945 the technical aspects of the gas chambers have been a neglected subject because nobody imagined that one day their existence would have to be proved. [my emphasis]

The admission is significant. According to Klarsfeld himself, the “technical aspects” of the crime weapon had been “neglected” and people hadn’t thought of “proving the existence” thereof. No court, beginning with the Nuremberg tribunal, had really bothered to heed the procedure used in any criminal case of that type. The gas chamber was the central pillar of the whole edifice of the crimes ascribed to the Germans; however, people had “neglected” to study it in its “technical aspects”.

Consequences of an admission by Jean Daniel

 

In France, Jean Daniel’s Le Nouvel Observateur was the mass circulation weekly most relentless in combatting the revisionists. On more than one occasion it had published photos said to be of “gas chambers”. But, war-weary, on April 26, 1983 (page 33) it admitted:

There exist no photographs of a gas chamber…

which means that the things persistently presented still today to tourists as gas chambers at Struthof, Mauthausen, Hartheim, Dachau, Majdanek and Auschwitz are mere decoys. From September 1983 to September 1987 the French press essentially swore off showing photos of gas chambers, an advance on the American press, which continues printing photos said to be of “gas chambers”.

Fear of disclosing documents

 

In 1986 Jewish-American lawyer Gerald L. Posner published a book entitled Mengele: The Complete Story (in collaboration with John Ware; McGraw-Hill, New York). The title is misleading in that the author is obviously concealing what Mengele was able to write, after the war, about Auschwitz. On page 48 it’s said that, according to his son Rolf, Mengele appeared to be “quite unrepentant and felt no shame” regarding the years spent at Auschwitz. For my part, I’m inclined to believe that Mengele was neither repentant, nor ashamed because there was nothing for which to repent or to feel ashamed about. I’m convinced that his personal papers fully confirm the revisionist views and that, for this reason, the exterminationists who, by the intermediary of his son Rolf, have been able to get hold of those papers, refuse to divulge the contents (“In Rolf’s apartment were two bags filled with more than thirty pounds of Mengele’s personal writings”, p. 302). I have in mind, in particular, one bit of writing entitled Fiat Lux (cited on page 316); the title leads one to think that, in his text, Mengele sheds light on the reality of Auschwitz. I’m not the only one to believe that Gerald Posner, Rolf Mengele and a whole team of purported experts or researchers are concealing documents from us. In Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Vol. 2, n° 1, 1987, p. 9) one reads:

Had [Mengele], who did not repent a thing, really not written anything about these decisive years? And, if he has written about these years, who has destroyed or hidden these notes?

I consider that the treatment thus far reserved for Dr Mengele’s writings amounts to implicit proof that the revisionists are right in affirming that essential documents are being withheld from historians’ examination. The truth about Auschwitz is in Moscow, Bad Arolsen (West Germany) and New York: in New York (or somewhere in West Germany) with the Mengele manuscripts; at Bad Arolsen, in the archives of the International Tracing Service (closed to revisionists since 1978), rich in invaluable documents on the particular fate of every individual interned at Auschwitz; and in Moscow, where up to now the authorities have kept from view the near totality of the death registries (Totenbücher) maintained by the Germans at Auschwitz from 1940 to 1945 (the rest of the registries – two or three of them – are at the Auschwitz Museum and perhaps also in the form of photocopies at Arolsen, but there, again, all consultation is prohibited).

My question is: Why have the historians of the Holocaust, for decades, supported this systematic withholding of documents? What are they waiting for to publish these documents?

 

Revelations (involuntary ones) on the birth of the myth

 

In 1985 (copyright 1984) David S. Wyman published The Abandonment of the Jews / America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (Pantheon, New York 1984). This book, in line with the tradition of identical works by Arthur Morse, Walter Laqueur or Martin Gilbert devoted to the question of what the Allies were able to know about Auschwitz or other “extermination camps” during the war, demonstrates, in its author, a credulity and even a silliness that Europeans have a tendency to call “American”. The preface is by the false witness Élie Wiesel and the testimony on which the book opens is that of Hermann Gräbe, another notorious false witness (see Der Spiegel, December 29, 1965, p. 26-28). For Wyman, the Allies should have believed what they were hearing about Auschwitz or Treblinka but they didn’t really believe it. Even in Moscow, in May 1945, the American press correspondents were apparently inattentive or sceptical. He writes:

Also, apparently, the American correspondents were unaware of or disbelieved earlier reports on Auschwitz [i.e. earlier than the famous report of May 6, 1945], including the much publicised one released by the WRB [War Refugee Board] the preceding November [1944] (The Abandonment…, p. 326, n. 1).

The Allies were quite right in behaving so^[14] and in believing neither the WRB Report of November 1944, which we owe principally to Rudolf Vrba, nor the official Soviet report on Auschwitz of May 6, 1945, that is, Nuremberg document USSR-008, which counted among its four signatories the biologist Lysenko and the metropolitan Nikolaus or Nikolai; the former, after the war, was to be unmasked as a forger, whilst the latter had pushed complacency to the point of signing the false expert report of January 24, 1944 ascribing the Katyn forest massacre to the Germans (document USSR-054). Page after page, David Wyman involuntarily contributes to show that the revisionists are right on two essential points:

1 – The alleged “information” on the extermination of the Jews was nothing but confused rumours, vague, contradictory, absurd;

2 – Jewish organisations and, in particular, the World Jewish Congress, presided over by rabbi Stephen Wise, constantly exerted pressure on governmental bodies and the media to present those rumours as real information.

The word “pressure” comes up all the time in this book. The alleged indifference or inaction of American Jewish organisations during “the Holocaust” is a myth; the truth of the matter is that, despite their incessant pressures, those organisations encountered great scepticism, altogether normal when one considers the lack of substance of the alleged “information” on “the extermination of the Jews”. In any event, this book reveals, despite the author’s wishes, how the myth of the Holocaust and the gas chambers was born and developed during the war. Wyman would have saved himself a lot of work had he read Arthur Butz’s wonderful paper Context and Perspective in the “Holocaust” Controversy, presented at the 1982 revisionist conference and included at the end of recent editions of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century (p. 335-369).

Concessions by Pierre Vidal-Naquet

 

Pierre Vidal-Naquet has just republished his anti-revisionist writings. His book is called Les Assassins de la Mémoire (la Découverte, Paris 1987). The author makes a certain number of concessions to the revisionists, the first consisting in rebuking them, in his language, for murdering not history but “memory”. He thus recognises that they’re right on all sorts of subjects:

– on the more than suspect character of the testimony attributed to SS man Pery Broad (page 45);

– on the value of the “material gathered at Nuremberg” (p. 47);

– on the fact that Simone Veil was accounted for, under her maiden name Jacob, as gassed (page 65; let it be said in passing that this has also been the case with the communist head of the largest French labour confederation, Henri Krasucki, and his mother; as well as with Gilbert Salomon, today known as “the meat king”, and thousands of other French Jews less famous than these people);

– on the sacralisation of the Jewish people thanks to Auschwitz and on the profit that Israel and certain Jewish groups derive from it (p. 125, 130, 162, 214 [notes 90 and 93], 223 [note 90]);

– on the testimony of SS man Gerstein, “packed with implausibilities and contradictions” (p. 154);

– on the number of dead at Auschwitz: 4 million according to the Poles and the Soviets, “around three and a half million” for Lanzmann, but a million for Vidal-Naquet (personally, I would believe that from 50,000 60,000 died, but no investigation has yet been made and the death registers are still being kept hidden by the Allies);

– on the “imaginary gas chambers” (p. 219, n. 44).

The most interesting concession is that regarding Auschwitz-I: Vidal-Naquet no longer believes in the authenticity of the gas chamber there, which nonetheless is visited each year by millions of tourists to whom it is presented as authentic (p. 131-132, n. 94 and p. 214). I shall recall here that the first person, among the historians of Jewish origin, to affirm the non-existence of a gas chamber at Auschwitz-I was Olga Wormser-Migot, as early as 1968 (Le Système concentrationnaire nazi (1933-1945), Presses Universitaires de France, Paris). She wrote then: “Auschwitz-I […] without a gas chamber” (p. 157).

Vidal-Naquet has acted as a public prosecutor against the revisionists. He went so far as to attack me in court in the Poliakov case (see Revisionism on Trial; Developments in France, 1979-1983, Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 6, n° 2 [Summer 1985], p. 155-160). For him, “one must discuss the revisionists… one does not discuss with the revisionists” (Les Assassins de la Mémoire, p. 10). To make a comparison with sport, Vidal-Naquet considers that he’s far better than Faurisson at tennis and that, besides, Faurisson cheats at tennis. But if the latter suggests they play a match, before an umpire and spectators, Vidal-Naquet answers that he’s willing to play but on the condition of not having any opponent facing him. He asks the umpire to declare him winner beforehand and the spectators will have only to ratify the decision.

Vidal-Naquet is an advocate of repression against those whom he calls “the assassins”, “the abject little band”, “the excrements”. But, on experience, repression in its legal form seems to him, unfortunately, dangerous; in the end, the judges of France rule against the revisionists as they are asked, but not as severely as Vidal-Naquet and his friends were hoping. He writes:

Judicial punishment is a dangerous weapon and can be turned against those using it. The lawsuit brought against Faurisson in 1978 by several antiracist associations ended with a decision by the Paris Court of Appeal on April 26, 1983, which recognised the seriousness of Faurisson’s work – which is quite outrageous – and finally found him guilty only of having acted malevolently by summarising his theses as slogans. [from the English edition, The Assassins of Memory, Columbia University Press, New York 1992 – editor’s note]

 

Here, the exterminationists’ decline can be gauged by the fact that they’re finally forced to admit, four years after the event, that the Paris court of appeal had recognised the seriousness of my work and had, in effect, only ruled against me (heavily!) for having, in its opinion, acted malevolently in summing up my theses in slogans. One mustn’t forget that for four years, from 1983 to 1987, the exterminationists succeeded in hiding the content of that April 26, 1983 decision or in distorting it to the point of saying I’d been found guilty of falsifying history.

 

Other concessions

 

In France, certain Jewish authors no longer believe in the gas chambers, or advise others not to dwell too much on an examination of that prodigious weapon’s existence.

This is the case with Joseph Gabel, who writes that it is “with real skill that Faurisson has been able to exploit the mistakes of his adversaries” and “to deflect the debate towards the less solid positions of the ‘exterminationists’ (sic): the exact number of victims and the technical problems posed by the operation of the gas chambers”. He adds:

It was pointless and dangerous to enter into such a debate [on the technical problems posed by the operation of the gas chambers]. It is enough to say that mass gassing poses technical problems […] that it is not the job of the victims to solve these problems […] This discussion on the technical aspects of the genocide, before a public richer in prejudices than in knowledge, has constituted a tactical error. Messrs Vidal-Naquet, Wellers and their colleagues have fought on the field chosen by the opponent. (Réflexions sur l’avenir des Juifs, Klincksieck, Paris 1987, p. 135-136)

The periodical Article 31 didn’t shrink from publishing a letter from Ida Zajdel and Marc Ascione (January-February 1987, p. 22) developing the argument that the gas chambers never existed; they were invented by the imagination of certain SS men who thus slipped a “time bomb” against the Jews into some of their “confessions”.

An academic-level journal like Holocaust and Genocide Studies, just recently established, demonstrates that even the officials of Yad Vashem are now aware that it’s no longer possible for historians to write the history of the Holocaust with the contempt for truth that, up to now, was the rule. I advise revisionists to read this journal, edited by Yehuda Bauer and Harry James Cargas, attentively. For several years I observed the writings of Yehuda Bauer; I noted in him a “revisionist” tendency to ask himself questions about the National-Socialist policy vis-à-vis the Jews and about certain elements that suggest that German policy aimed at maintaining, all through the war, contacts with Jews in international circles so as to facilitate an emigration, and not an extermination, of the European Jews (“Europa Plan,” moderating role of Himmler, Joël Brand affair, negotiations with the Czech, Swedish, Swiss and Hungarian Jews). Even on the question of the Einsatzgruppen one is conscious that nearly everything the exterminationists were propagating needs to be re-assessed and, particularly, the execution figures (Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 2, n° 2. 1987, especially p. 234-235).

 

Conclusion

 

Only those quite new to revisionism can think that it will win out over exterminationism as the day eventually wins out over the night. In reality, the lies of exterminationism will go on imposing themselves among the general public for decades to come. To surmount the fables of one war it seems that another war is necessary. Without the last world conflict (1939-1945), perhaps the fable of Belgian children having their hands cut off by the “Huns” during the First World War would still be very much alive in the public mind today.

As Arthur R. Butz has shown (The International “Holocaust” Controversy, Journal of Historical Review, April 1980, p. 9), the Holocaust legend stands on feet of clay. This colossus may still encumber our horizon for some considerable time. The more the revisionists whisper that its feet are of clay, the more the Holocaust religionists will deafen us with their ballyhoo. On the academic level, they will feign to proliferate symposiums or “colloquiums” that will, in fact, be only soliloquiums. There are already announcements, for the near future, of the new “Sorbonne symposium” (December 10-13, 1987), which is not to be confused with the first “Sorbonne symposium” (June 29 to July 2, 1982) and, above all, the “Oxford symposium” (July 10-14, 1988). This last will take place under the aegis of Mrs Maxwell or, more exactly, of her husband Robert Maxwell, the British press magnate, a billionaire of Jewish origin. Its intention is to make the Christians feel ashamed of their alleged indifference to the alleged Holocaust of the Jews.

I doubt that, on the academic level, the exterminationist lobby will attain any success apart from the intimidation of historians. It’s going to become clearer and clearer that this lobby brings nothing to historical scholarship: neither any new documents nor any new ideas. The exterminationist historians, if they evolve at all, can do so only in the direction of revisionism. Thus is it that we’ve seen “functionalism” emerge by opposition to “intentionalism”, and that in Germany, with Hillgruber, Nolte, Fest…, there has lately developed a new appreciation (and relativisation) of the Holocaust that I, for my part, have immediately termed, in German, Ersatzrevisionismus. On the edge between this “substitute for revisionism” and veritable revisionism are seen lurking, awaiting better days, worthy historians like Helmut Diwald, Alfred Schickel and David Irving. Among the revisionists, a new generation is rising with, in particular, Mark Weber (U.S.), Carlo Mattogno (Italy) and Enrique Aynat Eknes (Spain). I know other names which, for reasons of expediency, I prefer not to give yet.

Shoah Business is going to prosper. The Holocaust museums are going to multiply and Holocaust propaganda is going to invade the secondary schools and universities. The concentration camps are going to become attractions comparable to Disneyland. It’s enough to visit these camps today to realise that, in two or three hundred years from now, they will still be there: their touristic value is manifest. Poland scarcely attracts any tourists with hard currency except for Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka and a few other camps. The tour operators are starting to measure the profit they can draw from these places where, in reality, there is nothing to see but where, consequently, “symbols” will proliferate. The less there is to see with the eyes, the more will be given to see with the imagination. From this point of view, Treblinka is an ideal place. Everything there is symbolic: the entrance to the camp, its boundaries, the rails of the train line, the access ramp, the path towards the gas chambers and towards the open-air pyres of bodies, the location of those chambers and those pyres. The Polish authorities will in consequence create a museum there all the more gigantic as the camp’s surface area proper was, in its modest reality, quite scant (not even 200 by 50 metres). In West Germany, in East Germany and in Austria there is probably no longer a single schoolchild, soldier or policeman who hasn’t had to visit one or several concentration camps to be imbued with the horrors of National Socialism and, by comparison, to be convinced of the virtues of the “democratic” regimes in place. One can hardly imagine a government that would take the responsibility of relinquishing some day this very easy form of ideological indoctrination.

There is no reason for Israel and the World Jewish Congress to mitigate their demands and their efforts in promoting the Holocaust religion. Such billionaires of Jewish origin as baron Rothschild in France, Robert Maxwell in Britain, Carlo de Benedetti in Italy, Rupert Murdoch in Australia, Armand Hammer in New York and Moscow and Edgar Bronfman in the United States and Canada are probably going to get more and more money (for it’s doubtful that they’ll be spending their own) to thwart the effects of revisionist scepticism. The personal fortune of E. Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress and emperor of alcohol, is reckoned at $3.6 billion. The French revisionists weigh, so to speak, a few pennies. Therefore one would do well not to harbour illusions about revisionism’s chances of success with a general public whose press is controlled by those magnates.

People will tell me that a miracle is always possible. The world political situation may evolve in a direction favourable to revisionism. Who can be sure that the Arabo-Moslem world will not grow tired one day of repeating the lesson it’s been taught on the Holocaust of the Jews? Who can be sure that the Communist world, what with the abrupt changes in its domestic and foreign policy, will not decide the moment has come to “rectify” the official history of Katyn and of Auschwitz and to allow free access, for example, to the Auschwitz Totenbücher? Who can be sure that historians in the Third World or former Third World will not, some day, try to write the history of the Second World War from their point of view, without worrying too much about the Western world’s taboos?

The fate of the revisionists will, for a long time to come, be to work in obscurity and danger. Their adventure is akin to that of the Renaissance where a few minds, pretty much everywhere in Europe, simultaneously and spontaneously set to struggling against obscurantism.^[15] Those Renaissance researchers engaged in a return to texts, critical analysis, materialistic verification; they preferred doubt to belief; they progressed from faith to reason. It’s in that same spirit that revisionism finds itself calling into question a whole system of beliefs proper to the Western world and a whole set of religious and political taboos. In this sense it is, in the words of French barrister Pierre Pécastaing, “the great intellectual adventure of the end of this century.”^[16]  

March 31, 1990

_____________________

Notes

 

[1] Hilberg’s deposition is summarised in Barbara Kulaszka’s Did Six Million Really Die? Report of the Evidence in the Canadian “False News” Trial of Ernst Zündel – 1988, Samiszdat Publishers, Toronto 1988 – editor’s note.

[2] These are some samples of the answers of R. Hilberg when cross-examined by D. Christie on Gerstein:

– I would put Gerstein’s statement [PS-1553] as one that one must be most careful about. Parts are corroborated; others are pure nonsense (transcripts, p. 904).

– Gerstein, apparently, was a very excitable person. He was capable of all kinds of statements which he, indeed, made not only in the affidavit but its context.

Question: He wasn’t totally sane?

Answer: I am not a judge of sanity, but I would be careful about what he said (p. 905).

– He was capable, in his excitement, of adding imagination to fact. There is no question of [sic] that (p. 906).

Question: And we know that [the statement that Hitler was there in Belzec] to be a totally false statement; right?

Answer: Exactly (p. 907).

– Well, [in the reproduction of his statements] I eliminated anything that seemed not to be plausible or credible, certainly (p. 921).

– [About another statement] Well, parts of it are true, and other parts of it are sheer exaggeration, manifest and obvious exaggeration […] Rhetoric… (p. 923).

– Gerstein was somewhat given to great excitability (p. 924). I would not characterise him as totally rational… but that is of no value, because I am not the expert of rationality (page 925).

Question: A very strange mind prone to exaggeration?

 Answer: Yes (page 928).

   – A far-out statement (page 934).

   – In the use of such affidavits, one must be extraordinarily careful (p. 935).

It is fitting to note that all these admissions were wrenched from R. Hilberg before the publication of the works on Gerstein by Carlo Mattogno (Italy) and Henri Roques (France).

[3] At Ernst Zündel’s house, in the rare moments of relaxation as a few dozen of us were seated around our tables, jokes regarding Hilberg and his theory of the “incredible meeting of minds” came thick and fast. We outdid each other imagining a world where the “incredible meeting of minds” would replace letters, telegrams, the telephone and where, at table for example, there would no longer be any need to ask one’s eating companions to pass the salt or the water since, by an “incredible meeting of minds”, the persons having those objects to hand would, engaging in “consensus-mind reading”, anticipate the unexpressed desire every time and would themselves, at the right moment, offer one the salt cellar or the carafe.

[4] Here again, at Zündel’s house, our recollections of witness R. Vrba made things lively. He became “the green duck”. This was in connection with the fact that barrister Christie, over several days, had taken shots at him that, each time, caused the impostor to lose some feathers without, however, dealing him a mortal blow. It was prosecutor Griffiths who struck the mortal blow on his own witness; he had, in a sense, asked Christie to lend him his two-shot rifle and, with two shots, he had killed the fowl: a “green” duck, for the pale colour taken on, at the moment of collapsing, by the “witness” R. Vrba.

[5] See Shoah, a film by Claude Lanzmann: towards a crash of Shoah business….

[6] See Christian News, July 1987, p. 9; also the IHR Newsletter, no. 51, August 1987.

[7] After France changed its electoral system for parliament from proportional back to majoritarian, the Front National’s number of seats sank to one.

[8] In the December 1987 issue of the American monthly Instauration (p. 31-32), from which I have borrowed this translation, one finds an interesting discussion of the difficulty of translating the expression “point de detail”. Instauration rendered it as “footnote”.

[9] Demjanjuk’s Israeli lawyer believed, and doubtless still believes today, that a “gas chamber” operated by only two men was used to kill 900,000 persons in little over a year. See his account: Yoram Sheftel, The Demjanjuk Affair: the rise and fall of a show trial, V. Gollancz, London 1994 [present reference: French edition, L’Affaire Demjanjuk, J.-C. Lattès, Paris 1994, p. 170 and 366].

[10] Enrique Aynat Eknes’s Crematoriums II and III of Birkenau: A Critical Study appeared in the Fall 1988 Journal of Historical Review (Vol. 8, no. 3).

[11] Indeed, Hilberg refused to testify at Zündel’s second trial in Toronto (1988).

[12] Here are the two paragraphs as they appear at the bottom of page 7 and the top of page 8 of the transcript. I have underlined the words that authors usually leave out or ignore:

Unter entsprechender Leitung sollen nun im Zuge der Endlösung die Juden in geeigneter Weise im Osten zum Arbeitseinsatz kommen. In grossen Arbeitskolonnen, unter Trennung der Geschlechter, werden die arbeitsfähigen Juden strassenbauend in diese Gebiete geführt, wobei zweifellos ein Grossteil durch natürliche Verminderung ausfallen wird. Der allfällig endlich verbleibende Restbestand wird, da es sich bei diesem zweifellos um den widerstandsfähigsten Teil handelt, entsprechend behandelt werden müssen, da dieser, eine natürliche Auslese darstellend, bei Freilassung als Keimzelle eines neuen jüdischen Aufbaues anzusprechen ist. (Siehe die Erfahrung der Geschichte).

(Under proper direction the Jews shall now, in the course of the final solution, be taken to the East and put to work in a suitable way. In big labour columns, with separation of the sexes, the Jews capable of work will be conducted to these areas, building roads, whereby undoubtedly a large part will be lost through natural decrease. The total remnant that finally, in any case, will remain – since this is undoubtedly the part with the strongest resistance – will have to be treated accordingly, since the latter, representing a natural selection, is to be regarded, upon release, as nucleus of a new Jewish revival. (See the experience of history.)

[13] The “nod” theory makes no sense in itself and is not supported by the slightest documentation. It seems to have made its appearance with Browning in 1984, when he wrote:

… Himmler and Heydrich needed little more than a nod from Hitler to perceive that the time had come to extend the killing process to the European Jews. (“A Reply to Martin Broszat regarding the origins of the Final Solution,” The Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual, 1984, p. 124).

In Fateful Months (Holmes & Meier, New York 1985), Browning uses this theory on at least two occasions: first on p. 22 and then on p. 36, where he writes:

If a nod from Hitler could set Himmler and Heydrich in motion, others eagerly looked for similar signs.

In 1987 Browning stated:

… it required not more than a nod of the head from Hitler to give the “green light” indicating that the mass murder should now be extended to the European Jews. This was not so much an explicit order as an act of incitement. Hitler was soliciting a “feasibility study”, he was commissioning the drawing-up of a genocide plan. How this was communicated, we do not and never will know. (“Historians, Hitler and the Holocaust,” a paper presented at Pacific University, Forest Grove, Oregon, in March 1987, p. 24; obtained thanks to Dr Frankel of the Oregon Holocaust Resources Center).

One might point out to Browning that in such circumstances, if we do not and shall never know how the communication was made, it is impossible to say that the communication itself existed.

[14] I shall remind readers that Allied officials never mentioned the gas chambers in their declarations. Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill very nearly did so in their famous November 1, 1943 declaration on German “atrocities” but, on the advice of the British government, refrained from doing so (Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945, Institute of Jewish Affairs [London], Clarendon Press, Oxford 1979, p. 296). Several months before, the Americans had planned to publish a “Declaration on German Crimes in Poland”, suggesting to the British and the Soviets that all three should publish it on the same day. This declaration contained the following paragraph:

These German measures are being carried out with the utmost brutality. Many of the victims are killed on the spot. The rest are segregated. Men from 14 to 50 are taken away to work for Germany. Some children are killed on the spot, others are separated from their parents and either sent to Germany to be brought up as Germans or sold to German settlers or dispatched with the women and old men to concentration camps, where they are now being systematically put to death in gas chambers.

Cordell Hull sent the declaration to the British. He told his ambassador in Moscow about it by a telegram of August 27, 1943. Three days later, he warned the same ambassador that there had been a mistake and, in a cable of August 30, he explained:

At the suggestion of the British Government which says there is insufficient evidence to justify the statement regarding execution in gas chambers, it has been agreed to eliminate the last phrase in paragraph 2 of the “Declaration on German Crimes in Poland” beginning “where” and ending “chambers” thus making the second paragraph end with “concentration camps.” Please inform the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs of the change in text. (Foreign Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers, 1943, vol. 1, p. 416-417).

It was in that form that the New York Times was to print the declaration under the headline “U.S. and Britain Warn Nazi Killers” (August 30, 1943, p. 3.).

In the end, the Allied officials showed themselves to be prudent and wise. Had they mentioned the alleged gas chambers in an official declaration of such international import, the world would have been changed: the German authorities would have vigorously denounced this vile and ridiculous wartime lie which would then have had its wings clipped, for the Allies, once challenged to prove their allegation, would have been confounded before the whole world. See also Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, p. 356.

[15] Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi directs the Jewish and Israeli Studies Center at Columbia University in New York. He wrote in 1982:

The Holocaust has already engendered more historical research than any single event in Jewish history, but I have no doubt whatever that its image is being shaped, not at the historian’s anvil, but in the novelist’s crucible. Much has changed since the sixteenth century; one thing curiously remains. Now, as then, it would appear that even where Jews do not reject history out of hand, they are not prepared to confront it directly, but seem to await a new, meta-historical myth, for which the novel provides at least a temporary modern surrogate.” (Zakhor, Jewish History and Jewish Memory, University of Washington Press, Seattle 1982, p. 98).

[16] At the time of my IHR paper in 1983 I paid tribute to the courage and sagacity of one of my counsel: Éric Delcroix. I wish to repeat that tribute here. From 1979 up to today, Delcroix has defended revisionists in court and elsewhere, with the spoken as well as the written word, and even with his physical presence where there has been danger.