Raul Hilberg now explains that the genocide of the Jews was carried out by telepathy!
Raul Hilberg, the most prestigious of the authors who defend the case for the physical extermination of Jews by the Germans during the Second World War, began his investigation of the subject in 1948.
In 1961, after more than a dozen years’ labour, he published The Destruction of the European Jews. In this work he presents “the destruction of the European Jews” as a vast undertaking ordered by Hitler in person who, he says, gave two orders to that effect; then various German administrative, police and military bodies, in keeping with those orders, coordinated their efforts duly to prepare, organise, monitor and carry out that vast criminal undertaking.
In 1976 there appeared a work by the most prestigious of the revisionist authors: The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. In it Arthur R. Butz, who teaches at Northwestern University near Chicago, shows that the alleged extermination of the Jews is a swindle.
In 1978-1979 I published two articles in the prominent daily Le Monde demonstrating that the alleged Nazi gas chambers could not have existed, and this for reasons essentially physical and chemical in nature.[1] Those pieces caused something of a stir. In France, Raymond Aron and François Furet announced that an international gathering of specialists would be held to demonstrate to the world that the extermination of Jews and the Nazi gas chambers had really existed. Among the specialists would be Raul Hilberg.
Shortly before the start of the conference, Guy Sitbon, permanent US correspondent for the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, had a lengthy interview with Hilberg.[2] The latter said some astonishing things, basically amounting to an admission that, with regard to the destruction of the European Jews and the Nazi gas chambers, there were not really any documents but only testimonies that “concur, just about”. Although Hilberg, of course, maintained his general argument, his explanations were radically different from those that he had given till then. It is obvious that the revisionist argument had something to do with this change. Besides, the interviewee conceded as much, even if only reluctantly, in stating:
I will say that, in a certain way, Faurisson and others, without wanting to, have done us a favour. They have raised questions that have the effect of engaging historians in new research. They have obliged us once again to collect information, to re-examine documents and to go further into the comprehension of what took place.[3]
The international gathering took place behind closed doors at the Sorbonne from June 29 to July 2, 1982. A press conference giving an account of the discussions and conclusions was expected. It was then that, to the general surprise, only Raymond Aron and François Furet appeared, declaring, on the one hand, that “despite the most erudite research” it had not been possible to find any order from Hitler for the extermination of the Jews, and, on the other hand, that taking the revisionists to court was like conducting a witch-hunt. NOT ONE WORD WAS UTTERED ABOUT THE GAS CHAMBERS.
Seven months later, in New York, before an audience of nearly 2,700 at Avery Fischer Hall, Hilberg summed up his new argument: the entire German policy of physical destruction of the Jews was to be explained by… thought transmission. If no document attesting to that criminal policy was to be found, this was because no such document existed. The entire German bureaucratic machinery had, for years, operated by thought transmission or telepathy. He put it in these words:
But what began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures. They [these measures] were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus 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.[4]
Let us note again those final words: “an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus-mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy”.[5]
On January 16, 1985 Hilberg confirmed those words and that explanation at Ernst Zündel’s trial in Toronto. He did so under oath during cross-examination by Zündel’s barrister, Douglas Christie, whom I was assisting.[6]
That same year the “revised and definitive” edition of his book appeared. In it, he did not use the expression “consensus-mind reading” but wrote:
In the final analysis, the destruction of the Jews was not so much a product of laws and commands as it was a matter of spirit, of shared comprehension, of consonance and synchronization.[7]
He spoke of “countless decision makers in a far-flung bureaucratic machine” without “a basic plan”. He evoked “written directives not published”, “oral directives and authorisations”, and “basic understandings of officials resulting in decisions not requiring orders or explanations”. There had been “no one agency”, and “no single organisation directed or coordinated the entire process”. He concluded that the destruction of the Jews was “the work of a far-flung administrative machine” and that “no special agency was created and no special budget was devised to destroy the Jews of Europe. Each organisation was to play a specific role in the process, and each was to find the means to carry out its task”, he concluded.[8]
For me, this is tantamount to explaining by the workings of the Holy Spirit something that was allegedly a formidable criminal undertaking of industrial proportions, carried out particularly with a weapon (a chemical slaughterhouse employing an insecticide for the killing of human beings) designed and created through a phenomenon of spontaneous generation.
I refuse to believe the unbelievable. I refuse to believe in what Hilberg himself calls “an incredible meeting of minds”. I refuse to believe in thought transmission or telepathy, just as I refuse to believe in the workings of the Holy Spirit and in spontaneous generation. I reject any historical argument, any system of historical explanation, that relies on such nonsense. Raul Hilberg is not a historian.
On November 23, 1978 the French historian René Rémond stated to me: “As far as the [Nazi] gas chambers are concerned, I’m ready to follow you; as for the genocide, I have the deep conviction that Nazism in itself is sufficiently perverse for that genocide to have been part of its intentions and actions, but I acknowledge that I have no scientific proof of that genocide.”
That is indeed the least one may say when one cares about the historical truth.
September 1, 1988
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Notes
[1] “The Problem of the Gas Chambers” or “The Rumour of Auschwitz”, Le Monde, December 29, 1978, and a “Right of Reply” letter published by Le Monde, January 16, 1979.
[2] “Les Archives de l’horreur”, Le Nouvel Observateur, July 3-9, 1982, p. 70-73, 75-77.
[3] Ibid., p. 71, A.
[4] Quoted in George De Wan, “The Holocaust in Perspective”, Newsday (Long Island, New York), February 23, 1983, p. II/3.
[5] In the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, “mind reading” is defined as “the faculty of discerning another’s thoughts through extrasensory means of communication; telepathy”.
[6] Hilberg’s testimony on January 16, 1985 (Toronto): trial transcript, p. 846-848.
[7] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Holmes and Meier, New York 1985, 3 vols.), p. 55.
[8] Ibid., p. 53-55, 62.