On Fred Leuchter

Michael Hoffman has recently sent me the new, enriched edition of the book he devoted in 1985 to Ernst Zündel’s first big trial in Toronto that year. (The second big trial was to take place in 1988.) The present book bears the title The Great Holocaust Trial and the author dubs it the “twenty-fifth anniversary edition.”

A few days ago, leafing through it to get an initial idea of the contents, I stopped short upon noticing, at pages 147-158, a text from 1992 by Fred Leuchter (the author of the famous “Leuchter Report” of 1988 on the alleged gas chambers of Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek, and author as well of other reports, published in 1989, on the alleged gas chambers of Dachau, Mauthausen, and Hartheim castle).

I retained a vivid memory of this piece which at the time I had found deeply moving and which in 2010, that is, eighteen years after its writing, appeared to me, in light of the many other trying episodes that were to overwhelm F. Leuchter in the interval, more moving still. Its title was Is There Life After Persecution?, with the subtitle “The Botched Execution of Fred Leuchter”. It was his paper for the eleventh conference of the Institute for Historical Review in the U.S. in October 1992, published in the Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1992-1993, p. 429-444.

I hope F. Leuchter, despite the condition in which he now finds himself, will somehow have the time and strength to add to that heart-rending story the epilogue that may rightly be expected of him, which would deal with its author’s life from 1993 to today. The whole, that is, the 1992 piece and the follow-up that remains to be written, would not fail to be translated into at least French and German.

F. Leuchter is one of the most endearing men I have ever met: his intelligence, his probity, his kindness and his courage are striking. His tribulations have gone well beyond what he has been able to tell us up to now. The Klarsfelds, Sabina Citron and the entire band of holocaustic shock troops, singling him out, ruined his life and reputation. Once down on the ground, he saw even some revisionists or semi-revisionists treat him with contempt or condescendence. In London in November 1991, when his hardships and humiliations had barely begun, the semi-revisionist David Irving dishonourably left him to his fate, before ending up calling him a “simpleton”. As for Carlo Mattogno, he maligned the “Leuchter Report” not without taking up the moronic arguments of Jean-Claude Pressac who, however, some years later, was to realise that he himself had defended, with the help and money of the Klarsfelds, a dossier that was “rotten” and good only for “the rubbish bins of history” (sic). I could name the names of a few other persons who have behaved hardly better, but shall refrain from doing so.

To end, I prefer to yield to Fred Leuchter himself. Let’s hear how he held forth to his audience in 1992. Today, eighteen years afterwards, his declaration, whose substance has been confirmed by time, takes on an arresting significance:

Much to the dismay of my executioners, the execution was so badly botched that I am able to stand here before you to speak the truth, and to tell the world that it is not myself, but the Holocaust story that is dead. I repeat for the record: I was condemned for maintaining that there were no execution gas chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau, Majdanek, Dachau, Mauthausen, or Hartheim Castle. There’s no proof for the charge, only innuendo, lies, and half-truths. Robert Faurisson, Ernst Zündel and others said this first. They, too, live as victims of botched executions, but nevertheless free to speak the truth in a strong and growing voice that repeats: No gas chambers, no gas chambers, no damn gas chambers!

Today, there is no longer a single person to come and assure us that he or she has, finally, found proof of the existence of those “damn gas chambers.” Spread the word! The magical gas chamber, like the whole “Holocaust”, is no longer anything but a tainted product of the industry, business and religion of the “Shoah”, even if certain historians, out of conformism or fear, persist in ritually mentioning its existence but without bringing forth any proof.

At the dawn of the year 2011 we can say it with even more certainty than in the past: on the strict level of science and history, the alleged Holocaust of the Jews with its millions of survivors – amongst whom numerous miraculous ones – and its magical Nazi gas chambers is indeed quite dead. The survival in the mass-media of the vile wartime canard and most phenomenal bunkum of modern times has no more sense to it than the artificial survival of Ariel Sharon, kept by his doctors in an artificial coma since January 4, 2006, that is, for the past five years to the day, without any hope of coming back to life. The last of the Jewish Mohicans to venture to find proof of “the Holocaust” at Auschwitz publicly relinquished his search on December 27, 2009: he was Professor Robert Jan van Pelt. Of the historians who showered us with purported testimony or confessions, I had requested “one proof, just one proof” of the reality of a physical extermination of Jews by Hitler or his associates. Then, going for better precision, I let fly with “Show me or draw me a Nazi gas chamber!” Finally, going to still greater lengths for precision, I invited, so to speak, “Holocaust” researchers to go and visit the capital of “the Holocaust”, that is, Auschwitz, and then, at the very heart of the camp, stand before the ruins of the big crematorium II, which tell so much; I challenged them to find us the least trace, on or beneath the roof of the alleged gas chamber, of what they called holes and ducts for the pouring in of Zyklon B pellets. For my part, I summed up my observation and its consequences in four words: “No holes, no Holocaust!”. Well before that, I had, moreover, published the building plans of that crematorium, plans which, along with a good number of other documents, I had discovered on March 19, 1976 in the archives of the Auschwitz State Museum and which had been kept hidden since the war. Those plans showed that the place which, according to what we are told, housed a homicidal gas chamber contained instead a simple depository, with the characteristic dimensions and layout for the keeping of corpses awaiting cremation.

Towards the end of this year, a book to be published in France will amount to a “laying of flowers and wreaths” on the grave of what the American Arthur Butz, in a masterly work published in 1976, already called The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. And justice will thus be done to the memory of Maurice Bardèche, Paul Rassinier, Louis-Ferdinand Céline and a cohort of men and women who, the world over, have preferred accuracy to lies. In the first line I see Ernst Zündel and Fred Leuchter. A hundred other real revisionists stand with them.

January 4, 2011